Baby Steps (Let's Get this Mini-Comic Started)

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of seeing Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez at The Free Library of Philadelphia. It was a great event. Los Bros Hernandez hadn't been to the Free Library since the early 90's and I had never seen or heard them speak before. They are legends in the comic world, and I wanted to hear what they had to say.

 What I loved most was that they didn't actually say all too much, and they explained why. As they clicked through a power point presentation up on the projector screen, they talked about where they were in their careers, what had happened to them in real life, what was happening to the characters in Love and Rockets. They explained their journey, but they pretty much reject the idea of any in-depth critique or examination of their work. They are the first to admit that a lot of their work came from an idea of "I want to see these two characters together. I want to see what happens" (I am paraphrasing despite my use of quotation marks). The trained literary critic inside me wanted to yell, "Bullshit! You must have had some message, some argument, some meaning in mind!" But to be honest, I myself often write and draw not knowing what will happen in the end. It is sometimes better to trust the dark side of the moon of your brain. Let your subconscious do some work instead. Anyway, it was a pretty awesome presentation if only because the messages I took from it were "MAKE COMICS!" and "TELL STORIES!" and "FOCUS ON CHARACTERS!"

Afterwards, when Gilbert and Jaime were signing books, I specifically asked what kind of pencils, brushes, and inks they used. Jaime does not use a non-photo pencil or a brush, which surprised me. He is a nib man. And graphite --> ink. And both Hernandez Hermanos use Speedball brand Super Black ink. So, I wanted to make a 2-3 page comics about what happened that night, what I remember, and what I walked away with. My comic art process in this post is the first step to making that mini-comic. It is kind of a dry run, kind of a preview, kind of practice just to keep sketching, keep inking, keep scanning as much as I can.

simple pencil sketch.

Used a G nib and Speedball super black ink.

Added some shading using cool grey Prismacolor markers.

Colorized the grayscale image and added some halftone shading using Paint Shop Pro.

Finally added some narrative text using a box as well as text directly into the image.

So, I do plan on expanding this out to a 2-3 page comic, so stay tuned to watch my progress. Or don't.