David Chelsea's Blog, page 40

Sylvania Preview II

Here are three Youtube videos similar to the kind of drawing I will be showing you how to do in my demonstration and workshop tomorrow at PCC Sylvania. I can’t promise it will go this fast:

Perspective Grid Speed Drawing Demonstration

Fisheye perspective grid speed drawing demonstration

Cylindrical perspective grid speed drawing demonstration

David Chelsea is reading:

Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia, 1910-1960

by Ross Wetzsteon





David Chelsea-Artist Talk

Tuesday, May 8th 2012

11am - 12pm, Little Theatre (Discussion)

12pm - 1pm, CT 230 (Workshop)

2012 Art Beat

Portland Community College, Sylvania Campus

12000 SW 49th Ave. Portland, OR 97219

971-722-6111

Stumptown to Sylvania

Not my best side

I had a perfectly swell time at Stumptown Comics Fest last weekend, signing my books, passing out copies of The Survey and chatting with friends and fans. But don’t take my word for it, check out this time lapse video of Stumptown Day One. I can be seen front and center, next to the big red screen, wearing a black vest. Don’t I look like someone having a good time?

At one point on the video I leave my table for a good chunk of time. That would be the slide show and drawing demonstration I did on Saturday afternoon for an appreciative crowd in Conference Room B111. I was demonstrating how to draw using the perspective grids on the bonus disc included with my latest book Extreme Perspective! Below are some of the sketches from that demonstration, along with a few others drawn during down time at my table.

The naked woman is from a new project I’m in the early stages of, a book of perspective grids incorporating human figures. There are a lot of figure reference books out there, but all of them photograph their models in front of white seamless, which means they are of no help to an artist who wants to integrate figures into a scene with perspective. Mine will be different!

Where I'll be Tuesday

If you missed the Stumptown demonstration, you have another chance to catch my act at PCC’s Sylvania campus on Tuesday. May 8th. from 11am to 1pm as part of Art Beat Week. In fact, this will be better, because my drawing demonstration will be followed by a workshop in which you will have a chance to try out your own chops on hard copies of the very same perspective grids I use. From the catalogue:

Noted author and cartoonist David Chelsea presents a slideshow and demonstration on perspective for comic artists, using printed perspective grids he’s devised to ease the pain of drawing. “It’s kind of tedious to set up perspective diagrams for every drawing I ever do, so I created a whole series of them using a 3-D software program.” The presentation includes works spanning Chelsea’s career in commercial art, including his first 24 Hour Comic, The Harold Project , which was entirely drawn over computer-generated grids. The discussion is followed by a live drawing demonstration and workshop.

David Chelsea-Artist Talk

Tuesday, May 8th 2012

11am - 12pm, Little Theatre (Discussion)

12pm - 1pm, CT 230 (Workshop)

2012 Art Beat

Portland Community College, Sylvania Campus

12000 SW 49th Ave. Portland, OR 97219

971-722-6111

The Survey: Early Returns

I had a chance to pass out copies of The Survey to attendees at Stumptown Comics Fest last weekend, and the results are somewhat surprising. I was expecting the overwhelming popularity of superhero comics to be reflected in the voting, but actually Superhero ended up in a three-way tie with Pirate and Humor for fourth place in the Genre category, behind Fantasy, Sci-Fi and History. Least-liked genre? Funny Animals.

David Chelsea is watching:

The Descendants

with George Clooney

Pick Hit: Fantasy

Must To Avoid: Funny Animals

Other results were more expected. Round or scalloped dialogue balloons stomped rectangular balloons as well as captions outside the panel (Sorry, Prince Valiant), and handwritten lettering beat out typeset in a standard font. A linear and stylized drawing style was favored over realistic, cartoony and silhouetted, with manga-style getting the most negative votes. Here are the full results:

Thumbs Up: Linear And Stylized

Most-liked Comic

Genre:Fantasy

Length:50+ pages (graphic novel)

Type of story: Dark and gritty

Storytelling method: Mix of captions and dialogue

Protagonist: Multiple protagonists

Conflict between: Strangers

Conflict concerning: Philosophy

Ending: Ambiguous/Bittersweet (tie)

Artwork: Black and white line with single second color/Black and white line with flat color (tie)

Panels: Wide variety of shapes with line borders

Balloons: Rounded or scalloped

Drawing style: Linear and stylized

Lettering: Handwritten

Layout: No definite number of panels

Format: Standard comics size (7 by 10 inches)

No Thanks: Manga

Least-liked Comic

Genre: Funny Animals

Length: 2-4 pages

Type of story: Slow and meditative

Storytelling method: Captions only

Protagonist: Straight male

Conflict between: Family members

Conflict concerning: Religion

Ending: Cliffhanger

Artwork: Flat gray tones only

Panels: Indefinite form with no line borders

No Balloons: Dialogue in captions

Drawing style: Manga

Lettering: Typeset in standard font

Layout: More than twelve panels on a page.

Format: Oversized (varies, but RAW magazine is typical- 10.5 by 14 inches)

That conflict over philosophy may be a hard sell, but otherwise the Most-liked example seems like a proposal I could sell to a major publisher tomorrow. The Least-liked alternative, with its slow and meditative story, conflict over religion and cliffhanger ending, may have to end up as a Kickstarter project. But don’t expect these results to be set in stone.

The crowd at Stumptown may not be typical of the comics market as a whole- the Con does have a reputation as more indie oriented than the San Diego Comics Convention or Wizard Con, and the larger publishers like Marvel and DC stay away. I expect to get more results more in line with mass taste as data comes in from the online version of The Survey, which you can take here from now until voting ends a month from now on June 3rd (US readers only, please- I’m hoping to eventually do versions for other countries as well).

Many thanks to Jason Renaud for getting The Survey online.

The Survey Is Online!

Photo by ocean yamada

It’s very early days on The Survey, my new project to pick the brain of the great comics buying public by polling readers on what kind of stories they most want to see, in which style, even down to details of lettering and coloring technique. Based on their answers, I will produce two stories- one, assembled from elements that respondents say they most want to see, the other featuring the qualities they least want to see. (Full disclosure: I was inspired by Komar and Melamid’s People’s Choice painting project, in which they commissioned a poll to determine what qualities people most wanted and did not want in a painting, and then created two paintings with just those qualities.) In case you missed my previous post about it, here is The Survey:

My favorite/least favorite genre of comics is:

Superhero

Western

Horror

Humor

Funny animals

Romance

Slice of life/autobio

Fantasy

Science fiction

Crime

History

War

Pirate

My favorite/least favorite length of story is:

Single page.

Two to four pages.

Five to ten pages

Ten to twenty four pages

Twenty five to fifty pages

More than fifty pages; graphic novel length.

I most like/least like stories that are:

Bright and optimistic

Dark and gritty

Silly and funny

Thrilling and action-packed

Slow and meditative

Educational

Satirical

I most like/least like stories to be told:

In captions only.

In dialogue only.

In a mix of captions and dialogue.

I most like/least like protagonists who are:

Male (straight)

Male (gay)

Boy

Female (straight)

Female (gay)

Girl

Asexual

Other

Multiple protagonists

I most like/least like conflict that is between:

Family Members

Strangers

Couples

Friends

Acquaintances

I do not like conflict

I most like/least like conflict that concerns:

Politics

Philosophy

Religion

Personal Issues

Territory

I do not like conflict

I most like/least like endings that are:

Happy

Sad

Bittersweet

Shocking

Conclusive

Cliffhangers

Ambiguous

I most like/least like pictures that have:

Black and white line drawing alone

Black and white line drawing with a single second color

Black and white line drawing with flat color

Black and white line drawing with fully-rendered color

Painted color alone.

Flat color alone.

Black and white line drawing with flat gray tones.

Black and white line drawing with fully-rendered gray tones.

Fully-rendered gray tones alone.

Flat gray tones alone.

I most like/least like figures that are:

Highly realistic with near-photographic detail.

Cartoony, exaggerated.

Linear, stylized.

Silhouetted

Manga style

I most like/least like panels that have:

A wide variety of shapes with line borders.

A wide variety of shapes without line borders

Rectangular form with line borders.

Rectangular form without line borders.

An indefinite form without borders.

I most like/least like lettering to appear:

In rectangular balloons.

In rounded or scalloped balloons.

Within the panel, not enclosed in a balloon.

Outside the panel.

In captions

I most like/least like lettering to be:

Written by hand.

Typeset in a standard font.

Typeset in a custom font.

My favorite/least favorite panel format is:

One panel to the page

Two panels to the page

Four panels to the page.

Six panels to the page.

Eight panels to the page

Nine panels to the page

Twelve panels to the page

More than twelve panels to the page.

No definite number of panels to the page.

My favorite/least favorite page format is:

Standard comic size

Magazine size

Digest size

Oversized

Square

Horizontal trade humor

The Survey made its debut as a handout at last weekend’s Stumptown Comics Fest, and I will post about those results shortly. However, for those readers who missed Stumptown, my good friend Jason Renaud has very kindly put the whole thing online. What are you waiting for? Take it now, and let your voice be heard!

One tiny restriction: please respond only if you live in the United States Of America. I’d like to keep the option open to do this multiple times for various countries. Komar and Melamid eventually did paintings for fourteen countries and one more for “The Web.”

While I could collect data from now until Doomsday, my aim is to take a snapshot of comics readers and their tastes at this particular moment in time. The Survey will therefore be taken down one month from this date, on June 3rd 2012. I will announce final results shortly thereafter.

Meanwhile, in other online news, the Oregon Movies A to Z blog recently posted a Handy Guide To Top Ten Oregon Cartoonists, including legendary names like Homer Davenport, Basil Wolverton, Bill Plympton and Matt Groening. I’m number 7.

Stumptown Snaps

I have been too busy compiling data from The Survey to write a blog post about last weekend’s Stumptown Comics Fest, but here are some pictures I took with my Palm Pilot:

David Chelsea is reading:

Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice

by Ivan Brunetti

David Chelsea is reading:

Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice

by Ivan Brunetti

More Stumptown photos from:

The Official Stumptown Flickr Group

Joshin Yamada

Glenn Peters

Just In Time For Stumptown: Immersive Comics!

This is a momentous blog post, for I have the honor of announcing the birth of a new art form: Immersive Comics. The parents are a bit of a May-December match: the venerable comic strip, which first appeared in newspapers over a century ago, but may be far older (Scott McCloud, for one, dates its first appearance to Ancient Egypt), and the immersive panorama, which has its roots in wide-angle photography, but only took on its modern form with the development of online photo sites in the 21st Century.

David Chelsea is watching:

Case Histories

For those of you unfamiliar with the Immersive Panorama, it is an image displayed on a computer screen which encompasses 360° of the visual field, which a viewer can scan through in all directions by scrolling with a mouse. The original image is a large photograph in a type of curvilinear perspective known as equirectangular projection (mathematically equivalent to a world map projection also called equirectangular), which is typically assembled from a number of photographs taken from a single spot using special stitching software.

Immersive Panoramas have become popular on sites like Flickr. Almost all of them are photographic, but my friend Tom Lechner (whose collection of panoramas can be viewed here) has done panoramic adaptations of a number of my spherical paintings, like this one, and this one and this one.

I included an equirectangular perspective on the disc of grids which comes with my latest book Extreme Perspective! I’ve used it to create a few drawings which, once mounted on Flickr, actually work as Immersive Panoramas. Here’s one. Here’s another.

This new drawing uses the same method but adds word balloons to make the whole immersive scene into a seamless comics panel. The setting is a typical comics convention, loosely based on the Stumptown Comics Fest. Since all the dialogue is rhymed, this panel is the latest in my Anapest series.

Many of the figures come from this previous curvilinear sketch done at Stumptown a few years ago. I learned from viewing that drawing on Flickr that figures which look natural on the page can look skinny and distended the closer they are to the bottom of the picture; I therefore compressed the figures somewhat in Photoshop to compensate and left the bottom mostly empty. The top is distorted in the same way; the gray bar at the top of the picture becomes a circular plate when viewed immersively.

View the drawing big on Flickr.

View the drawing immersively.

Don’t forget! I’ll be at Stumptown this Saturday and Sunday.

Stumptown Comics Fest 2012

Oregon Convention Center, 777 NE ML King Blvd. Portland, OR 97232

Sat, Apr. 28, 2012 - Sun, Apr. 29, 2012

Sat. 10:00 am - 6:00 pm, Sun 12:00 pm - 6:00 pm

David Chelsea: Extreme Perspective for Artists Drawing Demonstration

Room B111 • 1-1:45pm

Stumptown Preview 2012

Komar & Melamid: The Most Wanted Paintings on the Web

Still Sharing: More Pictures Posted On Facebook

Rebecca’s map of Dabney State Park:

David Chelsea is listening to:

Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition

by Daniel Okrent

Both Slate Online Etiquette columnists agree that you shouldn’t post pictures of other people’s children if they ask you not to. But what’s the best way to disguise their faces in group shots- blurring, pixellation, or black bars on the eyes?

The Funny Fat German: A Cultural History.

Conjoined gummy bears:

Separated At Birth?

The form of cartoon exaggeration that bugs me the most: eyebrows popping off a character’s head.

Anybody out there still think he’s a Muslim?

Almost Here: Extreme Perspective! In Korean

David Chelsea is listening to:

The Best of Sam Cooke

I'm supposed to get author's copies of the new South Korean editions of both my perspective books in the mail very soon, but in the meantime here are some preview images of Extreme Perspective! from the publishers' website.

I don't suppose THIS page was difficult to translate:

Extreme Perspective! preview page at Viz And Biz Publications website.

Juvenilia: David Chelsea Saves the Whales

Flyer for The Whale Show, 1976

I define juvenilia as anything I drew before moving to New York City in 1977; this flyer dates from the year before that (it's signed `David Celsi'- my professional alias was still several years in the future). It advertises a play whose subtle message was "SAVE THE WHALES!", presented at Mountain Moving Cafe, a radical feminist watering hole located at what was then Southeast 39th Avenue (now César E. Chávez Blvd) and Stark Street in Portland. The location is now an office of Volunteers Of America.

David Chelsea is reading:

Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive ScrabblePlayers

by Stefan Fatsis





My only copy bears a censor's mark. The play's director didn't appreciate the addition of a sign reading "Boycott Nips" (my cheeky way of referencing a then-current boycott of Japanese products by the Save The Whales movement) on the whale/blimp's gondola, and ordered the offending words blacked out on all copies.

Boycott Nothing!

Despite its 1976 vintage, this flyer is soon to appear in a book about Portland in the 1960s by local author Polina Olsen (The 60s took a few years longer to die here).

You can view this image big at Comics Lifestyle

Check out this David Celsi/Chelsea juvenilia album at Comics Lifestyle