The sketch page is another from the 1995 book.

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This morning is relatively cool. It’s been annoyingly hot the last couple of days. Hot enough that drawing has been uncomfortable. It’s no fun when you’re sweating on your artwork and the pages are wrinkling. More heat is predicted but I’ve long since learned not to trust the weather reports around here.

I did these sketches while waiting for a friend. I think the location was Renton. I’d taken a bus to wherever it was and we were going to hang out from there. I often carry my sketchbook with me when I leave the house. That and a book to read. Usually I read the book while I’m waiting. Getting out the sketchbook means juggling pencils and balancing the pad.

No post yesterday. It was our (Nizzibet’s and mine) anniversary yesterday. Sort of. We have two wedding anniversaries – July 21 and 22 – but the 21st fell on Friday. So we spent the day driving around the Olympic Pennisula. We missed a couple of turns on highway 101 that would have shortened the trip and then hit a bottleneck on I5 because of middle of the night construction. We finally stumbled in a little after 2 am.

The sketches here are mostly random. The only recognizable characters are Sister D (in sunglasses) and Black Molly (with the stitches around her eyes). I’ll write about Black Molly another time. At the moment I need to run some errands and then do laundry and plan dinner. Maybe get some artwork done. Oh yeah, sleep.

I love monster movies. As a kid my favorite monster movies were the ones with giant monsters. Giant monster could be scary but they usually weren’t too scary. When a monster is gigantic you can hear it coming. It’s unlikely to sneak up on you and eat you while you’re still alive. Most giant monsters were dangerous because they stepped on people, destroyed property and, occasionally, emitted deadly radiation, breathed fire or spit acid. Only a few of them were interested in people as food. Mostly they just seemed to be annoyed because people (and their cities) were in their way.

The big monster here is named Saurrnot. No real story here. He’s big and angry and steps on people.

I don’t think all these figures are related to the vampire stripper project. A couple of them look like they probably are. The rest? I think I was just drawing random nude women. I find that one of the best ways to figure out how clothes will look on a body is to first draw the body itself. From there I can figure out the way cloth will hang and stretch.

This is the last of the sketches from the vampire stripper project. Frank Miller’s Sin City had seen publication a few of years previously and Miller’s high contrast black and white work was very appealing to me. I was (and always am) also looking for ways to draw more quickly. Slow comic book artists don’t produce a lot of work. Usually I do a rough sketch with a light pencil, do a tighter drawing with a darker lead and then ink on top of it. This piece was inked straight from the rough sketch.

This is the non-stripping half of the vampire duo. The writer thought she was too butch.

The whole butch/femme paradigm is mostly lost on me. I mean, I get the idea, I just don’t frame the world with it. Some people are better at hammer and nails stuff than others. Some people revel in the foofy. Some people are delicate and graceful. Others go through life like water buffaloes. No one way is specifically better or more attractive to me. The only wrong way to be to be an asshole. And even they can be fun to draw.

Another 1995 sketch for the vampire project. The thing about comics, especially for the artist, is that even a short story involves drawing a lot of pictures. So it really helps if you’re in love with story. A really fast artist can charge through a story that he/she is uninterested in and be ready for something else fairly quickly. An artist being paid a living wage can stand to work on something he/she isn’t enamored by. But if you’re an artist working for free you really want to be grabbed by what you’re drawing. You’ll have to find time to draw the story in between work and socializing and chores. And you won’t make that time unless you’re working on something that lights you up. So it’s a good thing that the writer and I didn’t see eye to eye on what his protagonists should look like. I liked the story. It was something I would have enjoyed reading. But spending months drawing it? That would have been hard. It’s the sort of project I would say no to now. A dozen years ago I hadn’t learned that skill.

While we were putting together the first issue of the magazine version of Glyph we had a bunch of other projects that we were considering for Labor of Love publishing. One of the writers we were working with had self published some comics and was looking for an artist for a graphic novel he’d written. Despite being about stripper lesbian vampires it wasn’t a pure pulp story. He wanted it to be both arty and commercial. I did some sketches of his main characters (showing over the next few days) but they weren’t really what he was looking for. The women weren’t the sort of sexy he was looking for. Just as well I suppose.

I tend to be only vaguely interested in the US standard of sexy in real life. In art I see no reason to try to reproduce a version of sexy that I’m not interested in.

I can easily imagine myself sitting and drawing a spray nozzle that was lying in front of me. In fact, the spray nozzle would have to be laying in front of me for me to draw it. It’s not an object that I’ve committed to memory. It’s harder to imagine sitting and drawing a sandwich. But here’s the evidence.