Hindsight

Here’s the third video in my Odyssey process demo series. I think it’s pretty self-explanatory, it’s all about coloring with watercolor.

Here’s the second installment in my Odyssey video series. This video shows the transition from my digital layout to a traditional finish drawn in pencil. I hope you find my lowbrow video production techniques charming. Maybe I can get sponsored for my next book. (Adobe, Canon, Wacom, Cretacolor, Alvin, Holbein, Winsor & Newton, Fabriano, and Listening Library, I’m talking to you — give me a call!)

Yesterday I finally delivered The Odyssey, in all it’s glory — the files fill 3 DVDs! (and the stack of artwork I already delivered was about 4 inches high). For those who are curious, it was basically on time. I actually had the discs burned on Friday, but Candlewick closes early on Fridays all summer (nice!), so they told me to bring them Monday. Anyway, the contract actually said Sunday (not sure whose idea that was), so Monday counts as on time. Not bad for a 16-month, 250-page project, if I do say so myself.

Here’s something I’ve been chipping away at during the process of The Odyssey, and the first installment is ready. This video shows my process for digital layout of the Odyssey pages. Each week I’ll put up another video. There are six in all, and they’ll show pencilling, painting, and digital word balloons & panel borders. This is my first effort at screencasting/podcasting, and it’s entirely homebrew, so I apologize if the production quality is a bit amateur; but I hope you enjoy this glimpse into the making of an epic graphic novel!

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*A word of caution about this method: This is an unconventional way of using InDesign — a way for which it was not really intended. In the case of a long book (like, say, The Odyssey), filling up page after page with vector art can result in extremely large file sizes and degraded system performance. If you try this and your file starts getting above 500MB or your computer starts freaking out, try exporting to Interchange format (.inx) and then reimporting. Usually this makes the file smaller and happier. If it gets really broken, you can export the art to a static format such as TIF or JPG, delete the vector art and place the static art back in — but at that point you lose the ease of editing. As always, save often and keep multiple versions.

As I finally wrap up this monster of a book, I’m struck by the quantities of materials consumed in the process of making it, including physical stuff like pencils and tape, and also the numerous audio books I listened to while drawing & painting in the studio for 9+ months. For the interested, here’s a (fairly comprehensive) list what I consumed in the course of creating the art for The Odyssey:

40 Cretacolor Nero pencils (#3 medium – make a blacker line than graphite)

5 Plastic erasers

4 rolls artists’ tape

4 75-sheet pads of 12×16″ Fabriano 90lb. cold-press watercolor paper (each pad is about 1″ thick)

Upwards of 120 bags of chips (corn, potato, pita, root veggie, etc.)

3+ reams of printer paper

At least 22 inkjet cartridges and 1 laserjet cartridge

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The following audiobooks, listed by author (good unless otherwise stated):

Louisa May Alcott – Little Women

Anonymous – Gawain and the Green Knight

Bill Bryson – A Short History of Nearly Everything

Cervantes – Don Quixote (switch to an abridged version after seeing how funny but long-winded it is {which makes it good fodder for adaptation})

Eoin Colfer – Airman (didn’t like)

Daniel Coyle – The Talent Code (simplistic premise, but some very valuable insights about learning and teaching)

Joseph Delaney – The Last Apprentice

Corey Doctorow – Little Brother

Arther Conan Doyle, Sir – The entire Sherlock Holmes oeuvre, for the umpteenth time.

Kathleen Duey – Skin Hunger (lamest “ending” ever)

F. Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby

John Flanagan – The Ranger’s Apprentic, books 1-4 (fun but highly predictable)

Jostein Gardner – Sophie’s World

Hermann Hesse – Siddhartha

Laura Hillenbrand – Seabiscuit (fabulous)

Harper Lee – To Kill a Mockingbird (excellent, of course)

Geraldine McCaughrean – The White Darkness (excellent)

Frank McCourt – Angela’s Ashes (great, depressing), ‘Tis

LA Meyer – Bloody Jack, books 1-4 (great reader, gets better as it goes)

Kenneth Oppel – Airborn

Ovid – The Metamorphoses

Alan Paton – Cry the Beloved Country

Sylvia Plath – The Bell Jar (enjoyed way more than expected)

Terry Pratchett – Nation (awesome!), Wee Free Men

JK Rowling – The entire Harry Potter series (great on audio)

Louis Sachar – Holes

Mary Shelly – Frankenstein

Jill Bolte Taylor – My Stroke of Insight (recommended, but not on audio, as the author is a terrible reader)

Mark Twain – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

John Updike – Rabbit, Run (didn’t like)

Virgil – The Aeneid (didn’t like)

Kurt Vonnegut – Slaughterhouse Five (great), Breakfast of Champions, The Sirens of Titan, Cat’s Cradle (awesomely weird)

Jeanette Wall – The Glass Castle (great)

I recently gave a talk at the Aldrich library in Barre, VT (where, incidentally, I used to play D&D as a young nerdy child). This is more or less my standard presentation — although I made a few last-minute changes, so I was improvising a little. Here’s a 15-minute excerpt from the 1-hour presentation:

On December 14th (a week from Sunday) I will be making an appearance at a local comic convention in Davis Square, at the Dilboy VFW, 371 Summer St., from 9am-3pm. Come chat with me and other local comic folks, and buy some books and art. I’ll be showing some samples of the Odyssey art, too!
Speaking of which, I’m past the 20% mark on the finished pages for The Odyssey. Yay!

People often ask me which stage of the book creation process I enjoy the most. I have to answer that each stage has its own joys and difficulties. The design stage is the most creatively unfettered, but it’s very abstract, and sometimes I can’t nail down the designs I want until I get into the next stage, which is layout. Layout is where the comic medium really comes into play, as I make the million small decisions about which moments to show in each panel, how to compose those shots, how to arrange them on the page, and how they relate to the text.

When all that is done, it’s time to paint all the finished art. This is less creative, but more relaxing, as most of the big problems have been solved. This stage is the longest, and when I’m painting the verbal part of my brain is idle, so I often listen to audio books. All day. Five days a week. It’s when I get caught up on all the reading I haven’t been doing.

So here’s what I’ve been listening to in the last few months. You may notice that the list skews a bit YA, for which I blame/credit Alison.

Skin Hunger – Not too bad, but it has no ending, just cuts off in the middle of–

The Aeneid – Didn’t like it. Guess I can cross that off the list of classics to adapt.

Angela’s Ashes – Awesome. Depressing but funny.

The Glass Castle – Much like Angela’s ashes, but with quirkier characters who have less excuse for their predicament.

Airman – Didn’t like it.

Airborn – Story a bit lame, but great characters.

SlaughterHouse Five – Liked it a lot. Also interesting from a Zen perspective.

Little Brother – Cory Doctorow tells kids everything they need to know to be cool and subvert the Department of Homeland Security. Pretty good.

Sophie’s World – I already read this, and liked it enough to listen to it again, so obviously I think it’s good. It’s a novel which tells the history of philosophy (in a mostly fun and digestible way).

Cued up: Frankenstein, The Ranger’s Apprentice, The White Darkness, The Bell Jar.

It’s interesting to be planning a wedding and drawing The Odyssey at the same time. There’s potentially some weird symbolic juxtaposition, but that’s not really on my radar. I’m talking about more concrete things, like how I have no time for the wedding planning, and how I keep my wedding notes in MS OneNote next to my Odyssey notes, so sometimes when I open OneNote to check my Odyssey reference, I see wedding rings, and when I open it to paste in links to possible reception sites I see photos of fat guys I got from the internet for reference.

And yesterday I started making a seating chart for the suitors:

Probably everyone who reads this blog regularly is also aware of my Facebook page? So it will not be news that I’m working on The Odyssey, nor that I’m using photo reference of my friends as models for many of the “extras” — that is, the hundreds of named and unnamed sailors, suitors, servants, etc. who appear in the book. I’m also using some web reference for certain characters.

Once I have reference photos, I do a few loose sketches, try some different hairstyles, and then come up with character studies that look something like this:

Wow, I’ve been bad about posting lately. I’m in a tricky transitional phase where I’m trying to get up to full production speed on the finished art for The Odyssey, while simultaneously making a few last edits to the layouts. Anyway, here’s a fun little scene I ended up cutting because it was breaking up the flow too much. It’s the flashback of young Odysseus getting his leg wounded by a wild boar on Mt. Parnassus.