fuzzbottom tails

In the beginning, like any budding artist I drew with pencil. Art classes in grade school through high school introduce you to a variety of media, some you love, some you hate! Around the age of 10 or 11 my father contacted the Columbus Dispatch and the Citizen Journal newspapers, as I avidly followed the cartoons they ran every week..and I don't mean the daily strips, but Mostly Male and Forever Female, which were well written and well drawn! But I digress once again...Doc Goodwin and Eugene Craig were the creators of the aforementioned comic pages and were more than happy to give advice to a young artist, and look over my scribbles of the day! I apprenticed under their tutelage every Saturday for several months, with my father running me to and fro...I cannot tell you how much anticipation I felt every time I sat at a real drawing board to practice whatever they asked me to draw (my parents bought me my first drawing board for my 15th birthday...I still use it today)...and the best part was that they gave me my first experience in working with India Ink, and pens and brushes! Needless to say I ruined quite a few shirts (pens spatter a lot, especially in the hands of a young boy who wields them like a sword and doesn't know his own strength!) and several pairs of pants, but I began to learn exercises that would teach me control of my linework and how thickness and overlapping of lines produced textures and patterns. I loved it!

In college, I learned precise handling and control of these instruments as we drew dozens and dozens of pages of art, sometimes per week, to fulfill our assignments. Since my intention at the time was to work in comics or comic strips, mastering black and white art was key to the craft...color was always supplied by someone else or in some cases, would be handled by the initial creator. My sense of color was never extraordinary, but I knew the color wheel and what colors could compliment others best. I was having a blast throwing all kinds of dyes and watercolors around on my artwork until oneday when the school's owner, the famed Joe Kubert remarked in open discussion of the classes' assignment that I in particular possessed "the most garish sense of color" he had ever seen! Now we would all critique each others work in an open forum, never backstabbing or slandering...no no no...you had to critique in such a way that you not only told what you thought was wrong, but you had to offer a solution....so critique was not new to me at all...in fact I have very broad shoulders when it comes to people's comments about my work.

But the damage had been done. And I didn't even know it. I found that I retreated more and more into black and white solutions for my art assignments, and only used color sparingly if at all. That helped me understand and further develop my draftsmanship capabilities, but for some reason that comment stilted my learning of color. Once I discovered Paul Calle`'s brilliant pencil work (as I'd mentioned in a previous post), my abilities with pencil far outdistanced my patience for pen and ink, and I left it behind. But it wasn't until I learned computer years later (all the while experimenting with pastels and colored pencils along the way also, but on my own!) that I began feeling enough confidence to color my work as I saw fit. Oh, I still get heavy handed at times with the color saturation, but I'm more in control of my thinking and what I want to see accomplished with the illustration I've created.

I respect Joe Kubert. I respect his opinion of my work at the time. But looking back at some of the work I'd created then, there's nothing wrong with it at all.


Art is subjective. Color is subjective. People's tastes are subjective, and usually stem from personal opinion rather than from an open minded view. So my advice to artists of all ages or skill levels is to trust your own heart and trust your own opinions... and although you might cultivate other opinions, don't lose sight of your initial idea and remain confident in your creation and your decisions! You are the artist!

Passing my personal baptism of fire (or color!), I found that trusting my own judgment has led me into interesting choices. In Dark of the Sun, this particular spread (Iustitia Fiat Pereat Mundus or Let Justice Be Done, Though the World Shall Perish), tells the tale of two brothers, their mother, and a cruel, heartless father who rules the family with an iron fist...literally. Unable to take the abuse any longer one of the brothers murders his father, and in committing patricide he knows he will be executed for his crime in a violent manner. The other brother spirits his mother away to other surroundings, which spares them bitter memories of the past, but also spares their lives as Vesuvius erupts! With the mother and her one son now safe, I used warm tones to convey the warmth of the living, the condemned brother accepting his fate led me naturally into the cooler color range of blues and purples. The choice of color for the fist that signified the father's cruel abuse could not be anything other than blood red!

This piece was the easiest to color of all the illustrations in the book for two reasons. One, I followed the logic of the story being depicted and two, I followed my heart in looking for the way I could best convey the suffering and loss this family felt. The solution was there and the illustration almost colored itself! Today I look forward to making a lot of mistakes with color and finding better solutions...but nowadays, I'm my own worst critic!