Tr!ckster Cocktail Hour

Bá and I will participate this year again in the awesomeness that is TR!CKSTER. During Comicon in San Diego, while amazing stuff happens inside the convention center, there's just too much going on, and more and more it's easy to lose focus of what you want, what you love and what you're looking for. For these reasons, some amazing folks created a place outside the convention center where you can focus on creators who do their own comics, and where you can learn and discuss how to become a creator yourself talking with some great talented bunch of authors you admire or soon will discover.
This year, TR!CKSTER is promoting an activity called Cocktail Hour, in which one accomplished creator, or a team of creators, will spend one hour with one person who subscribe, to help develop this person's project. As it's put on the website, "YOU will bring a project you're working on and brainstorm, design, chat, troubleshoot, and create alongside one of your favorite working storytellers. Bring a script, an outline, character designs, comic pages, storyboards, screenplay pages, whatever you need, and experience one of the most focused working sessions of your life as you drink and create, together. Time and day to be mutually determined"

Bá will do one cocktail hour, and I will do another.

What does that mean? What can we do with your project? How can we help you?

- Let's say you're an artist with no script. We can look at your artwork and help you with your technique, with your inking or coloring, with your style. We can tell you what publisher your work fits better, and maybe we can even know who to talk to at the publisher. We can give you advice on how to start writing your own stories, and how that can be different than working with other writers. We can give you tips and advice on self-publishing.
- Let's say you're an artist with a script or project. We can look at your script, your story, your project, and help develop it further, see where it can be improved, talk about schedule, talk about craft and how the art and the words work together to tell your story. We can look at your character designs and help out create the look of your story, help you make your art your own.
- Let's say you're a writer with no artist. We can give you advice and tips on how to find artists, we can look at your script and tell which artist or style to look for, maybe we even know somebody who really fits your project. We can help sketch the characters, think about covers, design, how to package your story to propose your project to a publisher, and what publisher does the kind of books you want to make. We can go over your script and polish it, maybe tell you what artists like to see in a script and what doesn't help the artist to understand what that scene/panel is about, we can help you break down a scene in panels and pages.


If I got yourself interested in learning while helping out TR!CKSTER, go to the TR!CKSTER indiegogo page and subscribe to one one hour of intensive learning. It will be tons of fun, guaranteed. There are other amazing artists offering the same Cocktail Hour workshop, so maybe you can also have an amazing time with Jill Thompson and her storytelling and watercolor skills, or you can get expressive, cartoony and funny with Scott C (just to name two), it's your call. While you're checking the link, see all the other ways you can get fun stuff and help maintaining this amazing creator friendly space, buying prints and books.
Let's all meet up at TR!CKSTER and celebrate the art and love of making comics.

Watercolor drawing.

Sometimes I forget what we can draw while listening to somebody talk. Given the right tools, it's amazing how freeing these "loose" drawings are. Every artist should try it at times, in bars, in school, at conventions.

The "capture the moment" kinda drawing sometimes says more about you than about the person you're portraying.

The theatre.

Sometimes, in order to avoid losing the movement of the free hand drawing, I use reference photos on the sketches. This way, you can copy the boring angle of the picture in the sketch just to learn how that building works and to learn its details, but when you're doing the actual page, you're free from the reference photo and you can just draw like you like.

Another day, another page

Casanova 13 is out in the open, and I'm basically all that stands between the reader and Casanova 14, since I'm still drawing our double-sized last issue. When all is said and done, I hope people forget the issues that came out late and focus on the quality of the work, which should be the only concern.

I wonder if peole will notice the change of styles midway through the last issue, but I rather think the story will keep the reader busy enough that nobody will even pay attention to the art.

I'm on page 22, by the way, so it shouldn't be long now.

Panel 2, page 19

Panel 2

On Ruby B. and Seychelle. Ruby gesticulates, concerned. Seychelle checks the data on a floating computer.

Ruby B: Are you sure it's him? Have we found him?

Seychelle: Just give me one moment.


. . .

New style

For the past four months, I can't find the brush I use to buy anywhere in the city. It's sold out. I've been treating my brush real nice and it's lasting a lot of time, but there's just so much I can take. The time has come for DESPERATE measures!

I'm changing my style, and from now on I'll only draw like this:

Talking about style back in the day.

I've done these series of drawings to use on a class about inking and style. They were all done based on a photograph, so none of them show what my style really is, but they show 4 different ways to draw the same scene.



Your style is the way you chose to show things or to say things. It's all you've chosen to put in and all you left out.



If you're looking at a photograph, you see all that's there to see, all that was captured by the lenses and when you want to draw that, you have to chose what is important for the drawing and what is useless information. All those things you find important, all the details that make it into the picture, they are defined by your style.



When you're not looking at a picture to draw something, you'll have to make all the decisions of what goes in and what stays out in your mind. For something like that to really work, you must know very well the subject you're gonna draw. And that's when live drawing comes very handy. The more live drawing sketches you make, the more studies you do, more "visual vocabulary" you get to enable you to draw anything you want in your own style.



There's no right or wrong, better or worse. I can't say a clean sharp style like Mignola's is better than a very scratchy dirty "detailed" art like McFarlane's, a cartoony style like Jeff Smith's or the very photo-realistic cinematic style of Bryan Hitch. You all know I'm teasing you and all I could say would be a matter of personal taste, but what really matters in the end is that all the choices you make work in favor of the story. Your art should help you tell the story and not distract the eyes of the reader.

There are endless bits of information in every single panel you make and it's up to you to chose what will help you tell your story and what's useless lines in a piece of paper.