I haven’t posted much art here lately, mostly thanks to not being able to draw much due to Mystery Wrist Injury (and during finals! Oy gevalt!!!), but I have been able to struggle through some stuff, like this! These are the thumbnails for the comic I’m currently penciling for my Cartooning class. They are really tiny—3 1/4 by 5 inches—and my professor had us blow them up onto 11 by 17 inches sheets of paper and trace them unto bristol board to serve as the foundation for our pencils. Not my usual method of making comics, but it was interesting to try.

Anyways, you might not be able to follow all the story without dialogue, but it’s a little vignette about a character I’ve used in comics before (if I hadn’t had ~issues~ last year she would’ve been the basis of my junior thesis, a comic I hope to return to eventually) named Libke, who in a 12 year old jewish girl living in a fantasy version of an Eastern European ghetto in around the first half of the 1800s, who is much too clever for her own good and manages to create a Golem. And then they go on adventures and wreck some goyishe shit, as Golems are wont to do. In this comic her cousins have convinced her to bring her Golem along to help them build a Sukkah and thus complete their pre-Sukkot chores that much quicker, but first they have to sneak their Golem through the ghetto without it being seen by anyone. I feel like there’s not a whole lot to this little story (being in pain while coming up with plots will do that) but there are some fun references to jewish folklore in Libke’s various power fantasies spread throughout the comic. And it was good to use these characters again.

Hopefully I’ll be able to upload some finished pencils for this soon because my poor fucked-up arthritic wrist will resist completely shitting out on me. Because there’s nothing you want to read more during Chanukkah than a comic about Sukkot.

I’m working on a four-page comic for class right now and I thought it might be interesting (?) to blog the entire process of creating it. It’s called Scary Monster Stories and it’s about little kids at a slumber party and awful teenagers and bad mythology jokes.

These are, I guess, “brainstorming sketches”? I’m a very visual thinker so after I work out in my sketchbook what I’m doing my comic about and the general trajectory of the story I sketch out scenes I want in my comic and write out snippets of dialog. This time around my sketches went really smoothly (so much that they should be understandable to someone that is Not Me) but it’s probably because I’ve been working with half of these characters for years and I’ve been kicking around this story idea for awhile.

Usually, I would edit these sketches together into thumbnails and go from there, but this class requires us to write a script first. I don’t usually write scripts because once again, I’m a visual thinker, but I took it as an opportunity to do a lot of work on the dialogue and work towards each character having a more distinctive ”voice”. Class is on Monday so after critique I’ll presumably be turning the script into thumbnails, then pencils, then inks…then a finished comic! Stay tuned.

I mentioned awhile back I was going to post some more work from when I took Jason Little’s sophomore drawing class at SVA.

And here you go! All the landscape and perspective-based homeworks.

Listen up any baby comix majors reading my blog/the SVA tag: it’s not as glamorous as character design or crazy panel compositions, but if you wanna draw GOOD comics you GOTTA learn how to do perspective. Comix require you to bring entire worlds to life and  things like proper perspective can make or break that experience for your readers. Learn that shit!!!

And think of how cool you’ll look when you whip out a staircase in three-point perspective like it ain’t no thing. So cool.

P.S. guess my favorite breed of dog