a couple of different things came to-
gether. One was Alberto Mielgo and myself worked on that Beatles: Rock
Band cinematic in London, and Char-
lie Bean, who’s directing Tron, was in London at the same time, so there’s an obvious connection between the three of us knowing each other. And the other connection I think comes through Titmouse because those guys asked me to do some designs for
Motorcity a couple of years ago, and
that kind of put me on the Disney radar. And so, when Charlie started to staff up on Tron, I guess my name came up again, and it just seemed to be a bunch of happy coincidences. DRAW!: And you were the main character designer, right?
RV: I was, yeah.
DRAW!: I know that they’re doing it in a 3-D program. It looks like they’re taking your designs and then basically
building 3-D characters and then doing some form of cel shading on them. Were there any issues with that from your side as a designer?
RV: You know, we came up with some pretty specific designs, and I wanted to introduce some gradients on the characters to specifically soften some of the shad- ows around the eyes, or add wrinkles on some of the male characters, or create something that looked like mas- cara or kind of like a smoky eyes look on some of the girls. So some of that stuff is actually painted right into the 3-D model. And then the incidental shadows that you’re talking about, with the Toon Shader, that’s more on the Polygon side of things.
DRAW!: So it’s a real combination of the surface texture versus the lighting? RV: Yeah, the way we sort of referred to it was that there were shadows that were baked in, and then there were shadows that were specific to the lighting of whatever scene. Those were just incidental shadows. Charlie, Alberto, Polygon, and I, we looked at some different Toon Shaders, and some of them looked too liquidy, and some of them weren’t quite right, so there was a bit of back and forth on that kind of stuff.
Get
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DRAW!: Are these plug-ins or different programs? What’s the program that you guys are rendering everything on? RV: You mean the 3-D stuff?
DRAW!: Yeah, the 3-D stuff. RV: Oh, I don’t know any of that.
DRAW!: So you don’t know if they’re using Maya, or Light- wave, or whatever?
RV: No, I don’t know any of that. It shows up and it’s like magic.
DRAW!: [laughs] How was that different—or was it differ- ent—than designing the Rock Band stuff, or working on the Gorillaz videos? Is there a different set of overall design cri- teria or problems that make things easier or more difficult for you when you are going between projects like this?
RV: I think, going back to the Gorillaz stuff, the dynamic there was Jamie [Hewlett] would show up with a storyboard and the character models, the design pack, which is basical- ly the way he wanted to draw the characters. And what they were wearing. You know, he was really specific about the kind of groovy details that the characters were wearing. And from there we would go on to a paper- drawn methodology or pipeline, and that was kind of a similar thing with the Beatles: Rock Band ex- cept, instead of getting designs and storyboards from Jamie, I was do- ing the designs and the storyboards. And then, again, we would go on to a traditional 2-D pipeline.
The difference with the Tron stuff was because it was set in the digital world, and Charlie said, “Let’s do it all on the Cintiq. Let’s keep it all digital.” This goes back about two years, I guess. I got a Cintiq, and started drawing every- thing in Photoshop.
DRAW!: So this was all digital, just like the movie? There was no paper process on the Tron work? RV: There might have been really early on, when I was waiting for my Cintiq to arrive. There was about a six-week wait for them to get more in stock, so in the meantime I was doing what I usually do: drawing on paper, scanning it, putting it into Photoshop, cleaning it up, and then sending it to Charlie. Then I got my Cintiq, and everything went digital; I was drawing right in Photoshop, and that really lends itself to more of a… I don’t know, a slicker look, less chalky-looking than with the linework, and that was starting to integrate better with Alber- to’s stuff. You know, it’s just the way it went. Now I’ve totally fallen in love with my Cintiq.
DRAW!: I always like to talk to artists about that because I see people who work digitally because the demand of the job says, “We need it digitally,” but who prefer to work traditionally. There are people who like working back and forth between both—the virtual world and the meat world, as I call them.
Going into your graphic novel, are you doing that tradi- tionally, or is it a combination, or are you also doing that all digitally?
(above) Traditional 2-D pencil design work for The Beatles: Rock Band video game. (below) A page from Robert Valley’s “Junk.”
The Beatles ™ Apple Corps Ltd. Rock Band © Harmonix Music Systems, Inc. Junk © Robert Valley.
RV: Well, I was just all in as far as the digital stuff on Tron, so I put my paper and pencils away for, like, a year-and-a- half, and then I sort of transitioned from that kind of mindset right into my first Pear Cider book, and kept all that digital. I launched the book with an art show in France, and I didn’t have any original artwork. It was all digital, so I made prints. Afterwards, once the book was released and I started to promote it, I realized that what people really wanted was the tangible, 2-D, paper artwork. And I thought, “Wow, that makes sense. Now I get it.” So with the second book, the one that I just finished, I did all of the planning, the thumbnails, and the rough drawings on paper, and then I scanned that in and used that as the first step. Once it was all digital, then it was all Photoshop after that, but at least there’s some aspect of the pipeline that’s analog.
DRAW!: So you were doing that for the people coming to the show. Do you find that doing it that way also adds something to your process as an artist?
RV: It does. I find, while I’m doing some storyboards this morning—I’m just starting a new project—that the very initial ideas, where you’re just kind of conjuring up ideas in your head, and you want to get them out real fast? For me there’s no better way to do that than with thumbnails, pens, and paper, and I just record those first nuggets of ideas as quickly as pos- sible. It seems like trying to do that on the Cintiq, there’s a bit more of a delay time, it takes a bit longer, and it’s not quite as immediate, especially with what I’m doing right now, because those flocks of ideas are so fleeting. They just come and go so quickly that it’s a really delicate time. [laughs]
DRAW!: In a way it’s sort of like when you have a dream, and when you wake up from your dream, if you don’t write it down, you start to forget it really quickly as the rest of the day creeps into your memory banks. Then, later on, you’re like, “Wow, was that in my dream, or was that part of another dream?” It sort of reinforces what I was saying to some of my students the other day; I was saying that, like you were talking about,
Scenes from Robert’s graphic novel, Pear Cider
and Cigarettes.
the spark, the first impression that you get, you want to get it down as soon as possible. When you add all those little steps of mediation between you and your ability to express your idea, there is always some delay, and the energy gets lost sometimes. I think it’s different in the case of someone like you, who has worked traditionally, and now you’re choosing to work digi- tally, and you mediate your digital experience based upon the things that you liked from your traditional experience, and you have a lot of drawing experience. One of the things I notice about a lot of young people who jump to working digitally is that that command-Z kind of mentality erases all their history. Sometimes when you’re doing a bunch of rough sketches, or a bunch of rough doodles, you do something and you don’t like it, and then you move on, but that mistake or the part you don’t like is actually part of the process that you can go back and ac- cess or look at, sort of like building your idea. You have really good drawing chops, so you enhance that or add spice to it in a digital way, whereas if you just learn to draw on a tablet, I think you hurt your drawing strength, your drawing curve, you know? I don’t know if you agree or not.
RV: Yeah. Going back to the point that you started with, that’s a really good way of putting it, but I was just going to add that the ideas that you have in your head, for me, they’re not as
fleeting as a dream. You know, they’re there, and I can walk around with those ideas for a while, sometimes months or even over a year. But when it gets translated, when it gets re- corded, that’s the really delicate part, I find, because if one of the expressions of those ideas, if it isn’t right, then I can never go back again. It’s almost like if it comes out and it’s recorded incorrectly, it’s totally contaminated. [laughter] So that’s how I feel about it. If I record it, and I get it mixed up or I’m in- terrupted or something, then it’s never going to be the same because now it doesn’t exist in my imagination anymore. It’s materialized in a bad way. It’s recorded. And it’s hard for me to go back from there.
DRAW!: You can take a piece of paper or a sketchbook and a pencil, and you can go sit down anywhere and draw. You don’t have to worry about the battery running out, or the wire getting pulled out, or something crashing, or whatever. It’s also a very intimate experience. I think personal computers are intimate too, but there’s just something that’s very human about making a mark on a piece of paper.
I’m really interested in talking to artists like you who are at the front edge of what’s happening in the entertainment busi- ness, because the need of the client is sort of driving the way
(previous page and above) A three-page sequence from Robert’s graphic novel, Pear Cider and Cigarettes.
work has to be created. In your case, you’re doing your book, it’s a choice to work that way. But sometimes you work on a project or you work with a client where they want something a certain way, and it might not be your chosen way of work- ing. Do you choose projects based on those kinds of criteria? RV: I think I’m still trying to figure that puzzle out. I’ve al- ways prided myself, when I work with clients, with getting a brief pretty quickly. When people explain their idea to me, I usually go out of my way to try to figure out what they’re thinking about, to try to flesh out what their ideas are. And that’s kind of what I tell myself. [laughs] It’s funny, in the last month or so, I took on a little freelance job, and, man, that was so far off the brief it was amazing. But it’s always a different puzzle, right? I don’t know what to say. Sometimes it looks good, and sometimes it doesn’t.
DRAW!: Right. It seems like it’s very important for you to not only work on these great commercial and
fun things like Tron or Gorillaz, but it also seems like it’s very important to you to con- tinue to keep your own projects going at the same time. Was that the idea behind the Kick- starter thing, to just keep your own projects going as well?
RV: Actually, I was just thinking about that the other day, that I had sort of started off my career doing advertising in my early 20s in San Francisco, and I thought things were going pretty good. The money was certainly good, and I was getting some pretty good jobs. After a few months, I would return back to my peers—people that I used to go to school with in Vancouver—and I’d say, “Hey, do you want to see what I’m doing?” And they’d say, “Yeah! Robert, he’s an artist; he’s going to do stuff,” and they’re always kind of interested. So I showed them some commercial work, and they just glazed over.
All the work that goes into appeasing the client’s needs, and polishing that turd up, it doesn’t go beyond, “I’m just go- ing to sell a product,” basically. So I learned pretty early on that if I was going to get any satisfaction out of my career, that that wasn’t going to be it. And then I went back to what the unsaid goal was between me and some other people that I had worked with in San Francisco, which was, “Let’s do our own comic!” We just shut the doors and pulled down the window shades and got to work on our own stuff, and that started back in 2002 when I did my first book.
In spite of any Gorillaz stuff, where you could hang Jamie Hewlett’s name on it, or Aeon Flux stuff, where you associ- ate it with Peter Chung—this Tron stuff is Charlie’s stuff— it seems like the books are the main way I can project my own thinking, my own storytelling, my own stylistic take on things. If you have one of those books on your bookshelf, you can go and you can see, “Oh, that’s what this guy does.”
And it’s got my name on it. At the end of the day, it pays a fraction of what any other job pays, but especially at this point in my life—I’m 43. I really want to make a go of it, and the only way it’s going to happen is if I stop spending my time working for other people and trying to manage their ideas. I just am finishing my fifth book, so if I keep going, I’ll just explode, and then I’ll have ten books. You know, Milo Manara’s got, like, 50 books, and Moebius has so many books. You get a larger library.
DRAW!: Moebius had a whole life of books of his different personalities, you know, the Blueberry personality and the Moebius take. At a certain point they kind of merged a little bit, where the Blueberry stuff began to look a little bit more like the Moebius stuff.
I agree with that. I started self-publishing back in the late ’90s because of that. I found that it’s great to play with
Images © R
ober
t V
other people’s toys—play with Superman or Batman or whatever, or work for Disney— but in the end it’s always that other person’s name on the project, and you’re only a cog in the machine. It’s just not wise for your artis- tic self to not do your own thing. Even com- mercially, people think of you differently if they see your own work. I know that, com- ing from comics and going into animation, people tend to typecast you just like they do in Hollywood. “Oh, you’re a character ac- tor. You always play the evil boss,” or, “You always play the heavy,” or whatever. And sometimes if you don’t show people another side of you, they won’t even know that you can do something else. I get that now with people because I’m spending a lot of time
painting and drawing things that don’t have anything to do with comics. I just had somebody say that the other day on Facebook. “Oh, I didn’t know Mike Manley could paint.” They just thought of me as some guy who drew for Marvel or DC.
Do you have a typical work routine? Are you a nine-to-five guy? Are you all over the place depending upon the job? RV: I’m early morning, usually 5:30 a.m. until 6:00 at night, basically. If there’re any sporting events going on, I want to make sure I get my work done before they start. [laughs] DRAW!: Al Williamson was like that. He would get up early in the morning, come in, sit down, do his day, and then at 5:00, that was it. He wasn’t working until 4:00 in the morning on something. He didn’t do that after a certain point.
RV: Nope. No way. This is a marathon, and it just doesn’t end. You’ve got to be fresh to do it again the next day.
DRAW!: You said you have a Cintiq. What’s your work set-up like, your studio? Do you have a digital side and a traditional side, or is it all mixed together?
RV: Like I just said, this morning I busted out the paper again because I was doing thumb- nails. I set that up right underneath the foot of my Cintiq, so I’ve always got the Internet available, so if I need to draw, like, Desert Rat style jeeps today, or Camaros, and dunes, and beaches, and stuff, I’ve always got Google available. I’ll drag the images off and make a little library of images that pertain specifically to the project that I’m working on.
DRAW!: Are you a Mac or a PC person? RV: Mac.
DRAW!: Are you using a tower, or are you using a laptop?
RV: [laughs] I’m using my laptop, and some- times it doesn’t cut it.
DRAW!: Because of the power that the Cintiq demands? RV: Well, no. For working on my book, it’s okay. I throw all my stuff on external hard drives, and I try to keep my desktop as clean as possible not to bog it down. But this project that I’m just starting right now, it’s going to be an animation proj- ect; pretty soon the laptop won’t be able to cut it.
DRAW!: Will you have to buy another laptop, or will you have to buy a tower? What will you do?
RV: I’ll probably get a tower, probably a PC, and just use that. DRAW!: I guess that’s another difference with a piece of pa-