GZapata

Interesting quote

2009-10-25T11:15:00.000-07:00

I was watching a ted talk (if you don't know what it is I suggest you google it) and came up with an interesting lecture on merging science and arts. Here's a link to the lecture http://www.ted.com/talks/mae_jemison_on_teaching_arts_and_sciences_together.html

The quote I found interesting was:
"Science provides us an understanding of a universal experience and art provides a universal understanding of a personal experience"- Moe Jemison (I believe the first African American woman in space)

Sorry I haven't updated this much. Been busy. Last Page of Clarity!!!

my love

2009-08-24T07:41:00.000-07:00

Took a day off from clarity and decided to draw my girlfriend. She's been begging me to draw her for awhile but I suck at likenesses. I think I got her right here though

venom

2009-08-12T09:51:00.000-07:00

Was in the mood to draw a muscled up 90's creation. This is the current gargan venom though which I like better

Paul Pope quote

2009-08-10T13:16:00.000-07:00

the anatomic quatro- axiomatic- manifesto

1- "comics" is a visual language. It is a stroytelling form

2- "comics' inhabit a place between the nuance of words and the suggestion of images

3- the art of good comics is doing with words and pictures exactly what you think you're doing

4- the comic not yet drawn can hold the forms of the greatest ideas an artist can have.

Paul Pope's writing

2009-08-10T05:34:00.000-07:00

An interesting (as all paul pope's writing are) that warren ellis found and posted at whitechapel

THE DESIGN BEHIND THB, PAUL POPE AND THE DESIGN CONTAINER OF COMICS

3. THB AS A DESIGNER LABEL
So THB is an ongoing comics series, as well as a loose grouping of splinter projects revolving around a "THB Universe" of stories, symbols, and characters. At the same time, THB is also a sort of designer label, like Fuct of Astralwerks, representing a product line, a style, and an ethos. THB is my reflection in comics.

4. TSCHICHOLD'S LAW
"Communication must appear in its briefest, simplest, and most urgent form." - Jan Tschichold, 1925

5. GRAPHIC SIMPLICITY
The influence of Japanese graphic designer Tadanoori Yokoo is evident in this drawing dated 10.31.96. Yokoo, and another contemporary Japanese artist, Masami Teraoka, have been instrumental to the new direction in which THB is moving.

One of my favorite graphic designs is Warhol's Rolling Stones "Tongue", done for the '71 album, Sticky Fingers. It's amazing such a simple, iconic image can say so much with so little. There is a graphic intensity inherent to comics and manga, a seductive, direct, non-verbal expressiveness possible, when we combine a few words with a series of simple pictures.

Graphic simplicity is one of our medium's strongest facets. The simpler, the better.

6. POP
I used to want to deny coimcs' link to Pop Art, particularly out of a misunderstanding of artists like Warhol and Lichtenstein, who continually used comics imagery in their work. Now I believe we must embrace and assimilate Pop as our direct graphic tradition if we are going to surpass it within our own medium. Pop stoles comics. We need to steal it back, along with the crown Pop gave itself.

7. LEGIBILITY
The designer has no special social considerations. But I believe a designer ought to have one special aesthetic consideration: He ought to strive to create legibility when giving form to ideas. A designer must be conscious of his design decisions. Even the choice to leave in a good accident is a conscious decision. Let the form be the one which best frames or clothes the idea.

Print design, whether for books, magazines, posters, or comics, serves a conventional purpose: It is intended to communicate ideas first, and perhaps to exhibit style second. Alphabets are no less conventional in this sense, and design is like a highly complex, personal graphic language. Design is a tool of communication, with specific, if open-ended, functions. We don't need to create new design theories for their own sake, especially if the old ones work perfectly well. We don't need to break something just to fix it. Our focus ought to be self-expression. The one exception is when the breaking the rules is itself the self-expression.

It seems to me the strongest argument for comics is that it has a direct link to the earliest stick figure pictograms of the ancient caves of Lascaux. Drawing is ancient. People have been telling stories with pictures for as long as they could think of things which need more than words to say.

8. DESIGN CONTAINERS
There is the artform of comics, there is graphic design, there is drawing, and there is the economy of packaging ideas as products. Inspired primarily by Yokoo, and fellow artist-designer Teruhisa Tajima, I've begun to think about presenting comics as part of larger print tableaus which I'm calling "Design Briefings" or "Design Containers." I think of these as the non-linear atmospheres in which ideas float. A comics story is a narrative told in the comics medium, but a "comic" is more than that. It is an idea vehicle, a reading machine, a design container, and an art artifact. I'm approaching THB as a kind of "down loading," the purpose of which is not necessarily to tell a direct story, but rather to persuade one to the ideas of the art itself, to suggest a mood, to uncover a state of mind, to evoke a sense of the time and place in which the stories were created. To create a world. A design container is a kind of time capsule, a graphic broadcast, a signature.

9. A PROVISION
The answer to the question, "What is comics?" can never fully be answered, or answered in some way which will inhibit future cartoonists. I reject that notion of Post-Modernism which asserts that all art possibilities have been discovered, leaving us merely the freedom to recombine pre-existing elements borrowed from different sources. I find that notion truncating and jealous, and simply wrong. There are as many new art solutions as there are artists to attempt new art problems. We don't fully know what is comics, only what it has been, and what it could be. This provision is true for all the arts. All art media must have a starting point here on earth, but an end point stretching some where into infinity.

GasMasked Crusader

2009-08-02T13:10:00.000-07:00

*EDIT* Due to submssion guidelines for zuda comics I will have to temporarily delete the pages I had posted during the review process. Sorry for the inconvenience people.

Busy Busy

2009-08-02T13:06:00.000-07:00

Been a busy week. Working on the hitmen cover at the moment. Putting the final touches on it. Their is about 13 or so layers on photoshop for it heh maybe I went overboard but I;m very much liking how its turning out. I'll also be making a seperate version with the original colors I had planned for so that mike can choose

Finished scanning my zuda inks. A few are close to being final colors as well. The big hill will be the lettering since I can't remember for shit how to do it.

Blah we shall see

Kyle Rayner Green Lantern

2009-07-30T19:25:00.000-07:00

Kyle Rayner

The next character in my batch of DC characters. I loved this character and the history around him. The idea of parallax made Hal Jordan so much mroe human and such an interesting character. Likewise I saw Kyle Rayner as the embodiment of a legacy character. Thru out his time as the sole green lantern he was tightly binded to who came before from Alan Scott to Hal Jordan. He grew into his role and eventualy went beyond hal as the green lantern. Sadly all that progress was rewritten to be a bug.

Anyways I see a future Kyle to have developed to be one of the best on Earth. A mixture of both legacies as a green lantern and the starheart of Jade and Alan Scott. Now a pretector of earth and leader of the Justice League he helps do to the new super heroes what he had to do- become a hero that would make who came before proud.

shuffle illustration

2009-07-19T10:29:00.000-07:00

This was originally a layout for the Hitmen comic but it got turned down. I can see why it would since neither main character is in it and it'd be for the first issue. I still would really like it to be though lol. Anyways I still loved the idea so I went ahead and did it as an illustration. It originally was gonna have pink in it....but it didn't work out. I will use pink for something though....just don't know what heh

anyways there ya go

random work

2009-07-15T09:52:00.000-07:00

The hitmen cover layouts

2009-07-15T09:47:00.000-07:00

Some of the cover ideas I thought up for the hitmen. As you could tell I am really in the mood to use a blue and pink color pallete. The ass one is a possibilty for the Hitmen cover though the colors I'd rather look more like other layouts. One of the things I want to do is make a cover that would stand out at the rack. Pink is not a usual color you'd see on a cover and is very strong so I thought to use it. We'll see how it goes

next illustration

2009-07-15T09:45:00.000-07:00

A preview of my next illustration. I thought it up originally as a cover for the hitmen but I don't think mike liked it for the cover design. I still do thought lol and will be making it for myself

Longbox

2009-07-15T08:21:00.000-07:00

http://www.comicgeekspeak.com/episodes/comic_geek_speak-850.php

It is amazing listening to this and it really gives me hope for our industry to be able to branch out again and be as good (money wise) as the early 90s but it be a good market rather than a speculator one.

Girl illustration

2009-07-11T08:42:00.001-07:00

An illustration I'm working on. I spent the whole day trying to draw wolverine and batman. Then I switched over to a girl. I couldn't get the pose how I wanted and in frustration I just decided to draw and this popped out lol. I like how it came out. I'll color it later on.

Wolverine to me is one of the worst characters to draw. Him and superman actually. Cuz both I want to exaggerate their proportions but never can. I almost never exaggerate the porportions of any of my characters even when I want to. It just doesn't seem natural to me.

girl walking

2009-07-10T08:04:00.001-07:00

So here's a spider-man drawing I did. Ben Reilly was always an interesting character to me. My first comics were when peter gave up the mantle to ben reilly and back then I thought it was sooo badass and thought it was great that marvel had the balls to do such a thing....years later I learned they didn't. O well the new clone saga mini series seems interesting so I thought to give ben a shot. I wish they'd kept the costume atleast. It was a nice progression which was new while keeping all the good features of the original. Even people who hated the whole clone saga agree with me that the costume was actually pretty good

return

2009-07-10T07:44:00.000-07:00

So I thought to bring back this blog. I have to rework the colors and get a banner and such up and running

This is one of my thumbnails for the hitmen's cover. I like the colors, unsure if its to cliche or not though. The blue will be dripping down more rather than what I had quickly done of photoshop to show Mike Garley (the writer)