February 7, 2010
February 6, 2010
favorite nibs
My first post about nibs keeps attracting comments, so I thought I’d post about my four favorite nibs at the present time: the Hunt 100, the Gillott 303, the Brause 66ef, and the Brause 511. What I am always curious to see when I do internet searches about nibs is how they draw, what kind of lines they make. So I thought I’d focus on that. I’ve shown a bit of this in a previous post, but I haven’t done it for the Brause 511 even though I’ve mentioned it before.
Hunt 100
The Hunt 100 used to be my favorite nib. It’s called the “artist nib” and it’s incredibly smooth and flexible. The flexibility has a drawback; the nib doesn’t last too long.
It’s also not a very good nib for hatching. If you look at the example to above, you can see that I had trouble keeping the hatch lines at a similar width. This may be a personal failing, but I don’t have as much trouble with this when I use other nibs. So I think the Hunt 100 is best for contour drawing and not for consistent tonal work. I’d suggest using it when you want a really expressive line in a straight contour drawing.
Gillott 303
The Gillott 303 is a great sketching nib. It’s very strong and yet also offers a lot of variability. Though it may not look like it has the finest point, I’ve found that it produces a finer line that smaller Gillott nibs, such as the 1950. And it’s not as scratchy as the Gillott 170.
As you can see, it’s not as fine as the Hunt 100, but the nib is a workhorse. And, as you can also see, it is capable of offering a nice range of line variability. There is a tendency for the 303 to lose the ink flow when it’s pressed too hard. This problem can be reduced by properly treating the nib, say soaking it in vinegar, and by making sure you dip it deep enough into your ink well.
Brause 66ef
I’ve been using this nib for Carnivale. This is a really nice nib. It’s probably one of the easiest to use finer point nibs I’ve ever seen. And doesn’t it look cool? It has a very springy feel, but it delivers a very stable line. One nice thing I’ve noticed about all the Brause nibs is that the ink flow is very consistent, no matter how hard you press the nibs (as opposed to what I said about the Gillott 303 above). Some sites about nibs refer to this as “consistent ink capacity.”
As you can see, the Brause 66ef offers very flowing lines. Also, the swell of the line is very consistent. What I mean by this is that as you change the pressure on the nib, the resulting line varies at an even rate. Compare the last line in the example above with the similar line in the Hunt 100 example. As you can see with the Hunt 100, as you release the pressure there is a sharp reduction in line width. The resulting line looks like a sharp slope. Conversely, the Brause 66ef widens and thins at a consistent rate. So if you want control, this nib offers much more of it than the previous nibs.
Brause 511
This is my new favorite nib. All the recent sketches posted here were done with this nib. It’s finer than the 66ef, but it’s not scratchy, which the Brause 513 is.
When I first used this nib, I thought it was too stiff. Yet that was before I understood that with a bit of pressure, the nib actually offered a lot of variability. So it’s not as immediately responsive as the Hunt 100, but it’s a more solid nib and it lasts longer. It also offers much more line consistency. Compare the hatch marks here with the ones done with the Hunt 100. The other advantage to this nib is that it works well on different surfaces. Recently, I’ve been using it over gouache, which is not possible with the Hunt 100.
February 4, 2010
web discovery: electrocomics
I just heard about electrocomics, which has a big list of comics that you can download for free. I have yet to really read much, but there is a story by Frédéric Coché.
February 2, 2010
everything’s coming up comics
The February 1, 2010 issue of The New Yorker features a Bary Blitt illustration of Barack Obama told in four panels. In other words, a comic strip.
The last MLA convention featured a talk about graphic novels.
And I just noticed this new book published by Arsenal Pulp: The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book. The description doesn’t say it’s a comic, but it does mention illustrations. So I assume it is.
This last book makes me think about how often comics are used as a medium of political resistance. Or, more broadly, as a medium through which to challenge the status quo. Perhaps comics’ low-brow status makes the art form perfect for people who wish to break apart traditional paradigms. I’ve heard many artists argue that part of the power of comics is that most polite people assume they are crap. And if your goal is to piss off most polite people, then choosing comics as a medium gets you that almost immediately.
Yet I would also argue that most oppression happens in text, though laws and linguistics. So if words are used against you, then visual art is a way of talking back and giving voice to your reality. This again brings me back to Citizen 13660 and how Akubo uses images to show the reality behind the language. And, of course, there is a bluntness to imagery that attracts artists. Showing oppression is often more effective than describing it.
Anyway, the idea that comics is a medium that lends itself to criticizing and subverting the status quo is one that interests me. I’ll have to give it more thought. Who has written on this topic?
January 31, 2010
January 28, 2010
Town of Evening Calm, Country of Habitual Denial
Over at The Hooded Utilitarian, Ng Suat Tong has a review of Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms (which I reviewed before). He has a very particular take on the book, situating it into a larger context of books about Hiroshima in Japan. His main thesis is that Kouno’s graphic novel fits a self-pitying pattern in Japanese depictions of Hiroshima, a pattern that completely ignores Japanese culpability. I haven’t read all the same books Tong has, so I have trouble getting as hot under the collar as he does. Still, I have seen how the Japanese, at least the Japanese government, has time and again denied its own role in some of the atrocities of that war. For instance, Japan has denied or distorted its alleged role in the Rape of Nanking. Likewise, Japan has also denied its alleged treatment of Koreans, especially Korean “comfort women.” On a personal note, I once had an older student who had grown up in Japan who exhibited the same mentality. In the class he was in, we read Native Speaker which briefly mentions the Japanese mistreatment of Koreans during World War Two. This student, though he had left Japan years ago and in fact was unhappy with the Japanese government, wrote an entire essay about how I was a brainwashed American promoting lies about the Japanese because I had students read this novel. So it’s interesting to me to see this denial as a larger cultural mindset and seeing Kouno as being part of it.
Still, I like her book. Jog’s response (number 15) to Tong’s review matches my own sentiments and he words his thoughts much more respectfully than I could. Still, this brings up two other ideas for me.
One is if the U.S. has a similar whitewashed view of World War Two. Many people in the U.S. view it as “the last moral war,” ignoring the oxymoronic nature of the comment. Yes, the U.S. didn’t “start the war,” but I don’t think that somehow exonerates all U.S. actions. Hiroshima is a big point of national guilt, though I think many people think it was necessary. Yet I also think many people admit the horror of Hiroshima as a way of ignoring other potential atrocities. I for one was unaware of the constant fire bombing of Japan by U.S. forces until I saw the documentary The Fog of War (which I highly recommend). And movies like A Thin Red Line only hint at some of the vicious behavior of American soldiers in the South Pacific. I haven’t thought this through very much, but I generally think most countries deny their personal responsibility for the suffering that happens in the world. Perhaps Japan is an especially extreme case. But I’m sure Japan is not the country that would spring to mind of you asked most people in the world which country is the most guilty of denying the negative effects of its military.
The other thought this review brought to my attention was an old one in literary study and that is how one views an author whose work suffers from the prejudices of the time. Think of the anti-Semitism in Shakespeare or the racism in Heart of Darkness. I know of teachers who will not teach Conrad’s novella and Chinua Achebe has a famous essay stating that it needs to be erased from the English canon. I see this and understand it and yet I can’t deny the artistry of Conrad’s work. Is it possible to note its racism and its promulgation of the association between blackness and evil and still be able to admire how it is written? I like to think so. Yet I can see how others can’t. And this poses a tough question for the study of literature. Ideas change. Politics shift. We can’t deny our own political views, but we also can’t expect authors from other times and cultures to see what we see. And yet I think it is important to see how artists unknowingly or intentionally promote a political point of view and, in some cases, how an artist is used to justify that political point of view. The British Empire taught Shakespeare wherever it went. Yet we can still see the beauty in Shakespeare’s language. I think to link art to politics and not see beyond that is to kill the complexity of art. And it denies the humanity of the Humanities.
January 27, 2010
gouache over ink notebook drawings
The first two here are taken from Gipi’s Garage Band. The third’s layout is swiped from Gipi, but the character is my own design. In all of these I painted the gouache over the ink lines using my water brush and old dried gouache. So the colors were mixed on the paper.
January 26, 2010
January 24, 2010
January 20, 2010
Jack Kirby and UCSC
I got this through Drawn. Apparently, in 1969 the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC), where I live down the hill from and where my wife is working on her PhD, contacted Marvel to do some costume designs for a performance of Julius Caesar. And who took them up on it? Jack Kirby. Wild. The designs are here.
1969 is near the beginning of UCSC and before Shakespeare Santa Cruz began. But as a teenager, I saw plays at UCSC every summer. This was the late 80s and early 90s, but still it’s weird to think that once Jack Kirby was involved in something so particular to my teenage years.
