So lately I’ve been doing a lot of freelance work for Rockstar, and having the TV on in the background has helped me keep my concentration and focus. Now that work’s slowed down, I’ve tried getting back into my sketchbook, and I find myself religiously watching the same programs I watched roughly a decade ago. This is adulthood I guess.
Here is TI cooking a lovely turkey dinner.
More after the jump.
So last night I spent a couple of hours at a Barnes & Noble with a friend, and in that period of time, I picked up Italian illustrator and comic artist Gipi’s book Notes for a War Story. I picked it up because it was there, and it had all the requirements to keep me interested for more than 5 minutes: the word “war” in the title, and a cast of characters that seemed to be exclusively male. I was pleasantly surprised that it’s an AMAZING book, and incredibly inspiring.
The artwork is amazing, and I generally have a terrible attention span for graphic novels whose artwork just doesn’t jive with me. But Gipi’s drawings are so deceptively simple yet so incredibly accurate; he expresses the emotions of adolescent boys so compellingly but manages to make it look so effortless in every panel. And it’s also just distinctively charming–it can go from adorable and cartoonish to manly and threatening in a second.
The story also has a lot to do with young men and the rites of passage they sometimes (misguidedly) succumb to in order to associate themselves with this myth of masculinity. Camaraderie during a time of war–it’s exactly the sort of thing I like to produce artwork about. In fact, a reviewer mentioned the influence of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, which is a work that continues to impact the way I perceive masculinity.
It made me think a lot more about a personal project I haven’t really gotten around to thinking about seriously–a graphic novel about Samuel Butler Academy for (Troubled) Boys. Suffice to say, I think it might be time for me to consolidate my ideas and goals for characters…and maybe produce some sketches.
So this past Friday I got a great freelance job from the AD of the Miami New Times. Miami is my hometown so it is a little exciting to get an assignment about the area–specifically about self-defense gun use in South Florida.
Here are two sketches i submitted on the article:
The AD chose the first thumbnail, and here is the final:
It was fun and interesting to work on a drawing with black and white specifications–usually I go full color, or i just leave lineart plain. I’m pretty happy with how this came out, and hopefully MNT’s readers will be as well.
