GLEN
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DEMOS HIS
NOIR PAINTING
TECHNIQUE
#24
WINTER 2013 $7.95 In The US THE PROFESSIONAL “HOW-TO” MAGAZINE ON COMICS AND CARTOONINGBOB McLEOD
CRITIQUES A NEWCOMER’S WORKROBERT
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82 65 8 27 76 4 2 0 3 Contains nudity for figure drawing instruction • Mature Readers Only
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JAMAR NICHOLAS reviews the
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and Image to his work with JIM
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WINTER 2013
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o. 24
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DRAW! Winter 2013, Vol. 1, No. 24 was produced by Action Planet, Inc. and published by TwoMorrows Publishing.
Michael Manley, Editor. John Morrow, Publisher. Editorial address: DRAW! Magazine, c/o Michael Manley, 430 Spruce Ave., Upper Darby, PA 19082. Subscription Address: TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Dr., Raleigh, NC 27614. DRAW! and its logo are trademarks of Action Planet, Inc. All contributions herein are copyright 2013 by their respective contributors.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
3
GLEN ORBIK
Mike Manley interviews the painter/teacher about the dying art of book illustration.
40
THE ORBIK WORKSHOP
Glen Orbik details his step-by-step process for creating a painted book cover.
45
ROBERT VALLEy
The animator/designer/comic artist gets his Swerve on.
56
ROuGH CRITIquE
Bob McLeod gives practical advice and tips on how to improve your work.
62
COmIC ART BOOTCAmP
This month’s installment: The Eyes Have It
78
THE CRuSTy CRITIC
Jamar Nicholas reviews the tools of the trade. This month: Crusty tricks!
LEE WEEKS INTERVIEW & DEMO DC’s Rising Star yildiray çinar inking legend JOE RUBINSTEIN
PLUS MIKE MANLEY AND BRET BLEVINS’ ROUGH STUFF’S
BOB MCLEOD
CRITIQUES A NEWCOMER’S WORK
I
t seems another year has come and gone, and that meansanother year full of Drawing! As I write this I am already drawing the Judge Parker strips well into 2013, and it seems like I just got used to writing 2012 on them instead of 2011. Yet, I still have only half my Christmas shopping done! Luckily, as an artist, giving the gift of art makes time spent at the mall a lot less.
Time runs a lot slower in comics than in real life. The con-cept of time itself seems to even be suspended for most comic strips and books in general. Some characters seem to never age despite there being strips or stories by the dozen dealing with the Christmas holiday, Thanksgiving, Halloween, Valentine’s Day, and especially New Year’s, when you actually address the passing of one year into the next.
But as we ring out the old year, I ring the bell once again. My hat’s off and a cup of holiday cheer to my regular con-tributors, Bret, Jamar, and Bob, as well as publisher John, and Eric, my Main Man who really helps get this mag out. These
guys really help make DRAW! the best how-to magazine on comics and cartooning being published today.
I’d also like to thank Glen Orbik for taking time out from his busy schedule and giving such a great interview and pro-cess coverage on how he works. It was also a blast to talk to Robert Valley, and cover his career and the amazing and excit-ing work he’s doexcit-ing now on Tron, and on his past work on projects like Rock Band and the Gorillaz! My goal is to keep the pages of DRAW! as packed as possible with real info on how to work, as well as with a diversity of styles and approaches. Next issue, DRAW! goes full-color throughout, which requires #25 to ship in July, giving us extra time to gear up to our new quarterly full-color schedule. As always, your feedback and kittens are welcome at: [email protected]. Till next time—go draw something!
-ING AHEAD
DRAW! #25 (80 pages, now in its new FULL-COLOR format, $8.95 print/$3.95 digital), the professional “how-to” magazine on comics and animation, features the über-talented Lee Weeks! You know his outstanding work from DAReDeviL, inCReDibLe HULk, et al. His insight into the artform is must-read material. Also, DRAW! gets to know DC’s Turkish sensation, YiLDiRAY ÇinAR! From his work on nObLe CAUses to the recent New 52 FURY OF tHe FiRestORms, Yildiray is making quite a name for himself. We also welcome comic book veteran inker JOe RUbinstein for a chat about his storied career, plus there’s the usual assortment of columns you know and love: “Comic Art Bootcamp” with mike mAnLeY and bRet bLevins, “Rough Critique” with bOb mCLeOD, and “The Crusty Critic” with JAmAR niCHOLAs! Edited by mike mAnLeY. sUbsCRiPtiOn RAte: Four issues US: $30 Standard, $40 First Class, $11.80 Digital Only OUtsiDe tHe Us: Canada: $43, Elsewhere: $54 Surface, $78 Airmail
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Glen Orbik
Under the COVerS
Interview conducted October 2012 by Mike Manley
DRAW!: You’re from what I seen via Facebook, you’re mostly a night owl?
GLEN ORBIK: Yeah, yeah, if I had my choice, such as it is. DRAW!: And you’re also teaching now, right?
GO: Yeah, usually I teach the later-in-the-day classes. One of them is in the afternoon, but most of them are evening classes. DRAW!: Where are you teaching now?
GO: Right now it’s basically the current version of the school that our teacher Fred Fixler started, the California Art Insti-tute in Calabasas, which is
about 20 miles west of us, and then on the weekends we go to Pasadena, which is, like, 20 miles in the oth-er direction. Right now it’s just the two schools within that range. Last year I was flying up to San Francisco every week to try that for a while, but the traveling was too much of a pain in the ass.
DRAW!: Have you ever taught at the Los Angeles Figurative Academy? GO: No.
DRAW!: Okay, so you’re working at the place in Calabasas.
GO: Yeah, Calabasas— Thousand Oaks, actu-ally—is the California Art Institute. It’s the one that Fred started when he sepa-rated from the school he was teaching at in the ’80s. DRAW!: I seem to re-member Steve Rude took some classes there.
GO: Yes. Steve likes to
go anywhere in the world, though, that has Andrew Loomis’ name mentioned frequently.
DRAW!: [laughs] How long have you been doing this? GO: I started taking classes in ’84 and started teaching in ’86. DRAW!: I think I became aware of your work when you started doing the covers for American Century, which was done by Howard Chaykin.
GO: Yeah, American Century. That was ’99, 2000—some-where in there. That was after we [Glen and his partner,
Laurel Blechman] got to do a bunch of Batman covers, and
DC did a line of pulp superhero annuals for the summer, and that’s kind of when we started with that.
DRAW!: Was that for the Warner Brothers store?
GO: No, no, no. The one at the store was later. That was actu-ally supposed to be a cool deal where we were going to get in with them and do a bunch of artwork, and they were going to fly us to Chicago to the WB store and do a big opening. And then the Time Warner/AOL merger happened and everything kind of stopped. Our big flight and big to-do turned into a half-hour drive south to Torrence to the last re-maining WB store at the time.
DRAW!: Were you into comics as a kid?
GO: Oh yeah. Would any-body else choose to go into comics? I mean, if there was not some sort of childhood fantasy in there to…. No, actually, I started collecting comics in the mid-’70s, and Lau-rel was collecting from the mid-’60s, so our two collections kind of butt up against each other. We went on purpose to do the comics stuff.
DRAW!: Have you ever done any interiors?
GO: No, I’m just too slow. DRAW!: Would that be something you’d like to do, maybe as a long-term project?
GO: Yeah, I wouldn’t mind; it would be fun. It’s just the reality of trying to pay some bills and things. When we were doing the painted covers about 15 years ago, we had several different people from DC and Marvel ask us if we would do painted books, and I said, “Well, we would, but we’re really slow.” And they’re like, “Oh, it’s okay, take four years.” I can’t really afford to take four years. It doesn’t really work that way. You can’t get 400 bucks for something you spent six months on.
DRAW!: What do you spend most of your time doing? GO: Right now it’s mostly paperbacks, doing a lot more of the detective sort of things. The Hard Case Crime covers are
supposed to be covers that look like they were done 50 years ago and forgotten about. Basically, whenever it’s supposed to look like it was done a long time ago, they call us.
DRAW!: And then you can hire models that look like Steve Holland that everybody used to hire in the old days?
GO: Yeah, that would be great. We have a couple of people that we’ve used, or when we get into a pinch, we use ourselves, but, yeah, we’re usually trying to push them to look like Holland or whoever would fit the bill. Actually, when we did the American
Century covers, we used the same two models. There were,
like, a dozen covers, and we used the same girl for all but two of them, I think, just different wigs and things.
DRAW!: Back in the Golden Age, the agencies used to do things like hire the models, or pay for the models, and do all that to help the illustrator. You have to do all that yourself now, right, wrangle all the models?
GO: Yeah, those days are done. We sort of got in during the tail end of that when we started doing paperbacks in the early ’90s, and some of the companies basically would reimburse for a few of those things, but that didn’t last long. That’s an-cient history. Now it’s just part of the fee, I guess.
DRAW!: When you’re going to do a cover, do you have mod-els in mind? How do you go about getting them? I suppose it’s easier in L.A. because it’s like central casting out there. You can probably get a guy that looks like a pirate, or a guy that looks like a judge, crook, etc.
GO: Well, yeah, that’s the cool thing about teaching is that you’ve got quite a few models and students who could make good pirate models or cowboy models. So that’s one good thing about it. I stopped teaching for about four years, I don’t know, twelve years ago, and it was a lot easier if I kept my fingers in the pie to keep aware of who was out there. When you’ve had some models work for you in school, you get to see if they’re good at doing action poses, or heroic poses, or whatever kind of poses. Or, if they’re really stiff but they have a good face, you kind of keep it in mind where you can get away with it.
DRAW!: I bought the book Rockwell behind the Camera, which was great to really see the amazing depth that he went to get his reference.
GO: Yeah.
DRAW!: Do you do sort of the same thing? You try to get people to ham it up or push their poses?
GO: That book literally was the idea of what we were shoot-ing for, no pun intended. But very abbreviated, not quite that elaborate, just because there isn’t that much time or money. I mean, they don’t pay you what they paid back in the glory days, when illustration was a huge moneymaker.
DRAW!: What I’ve heard is that basically the rates have stayed the same for a long while, so if you got $1,500 for doing a cover in 1985, you pretty much get $1,500 for doing
GO: Yeah, but the problem is that the [Saturday Evening] Post was paying $3,000 to $3,500 per cover in the ’30s, and
my grandparents spent $3,200 on their first house in the ’30s. So Rockwell was making enough to buy a house six times a month. So, yeah, we’re getting similar to the $1,500, $2,000 that we were getting 20, 30 years ago, but it’s worth less than it was then, and insanely less than it was when they were pay-ing that in the ’40s and ’50s.
DRAW!: I guess by going into comics and things like that, you have really branched out. It seems to be the way it goes, because editorial has sort of died out. I just read the other day that Newsweek’s going to stop printing newsstand editions. I guess they’re going online.
GO: Yeah, that’s what they say. Well, most of the artwork done for finished illustrations seems to have less and less opportuni-ties to be seen. It used to be that the artwork would be used to sell everything, and now they can use a lot of different ways to get an image on something, and they don’t really care whether it’s artwork or not, so the artwork has basically stuck around in the places where they do care if it’s artwork, like comics or fan-tasy or westerns, or a few genres where they actually view it as part of the package. But for a lot of other covers, or anything in general, now if they use a painted image, it’s more for the retro effect than because they need a painted image, usually.
DRAW!: I’ve been going, I guess the last four years, to the Illuxx Con here in Pennsylvania, which is a great conven-tion because you get to meet all the top-flight artists and talk to them, and it’s a really small, very intimate convention. It seems like a lot of people are really having to branch out, and that the biggest haul for illustrators is the whole pre-visual thing, pre-vis for movies, or games, or whatever.
GO: Yeah, it’s all on the concept end of it. There is a lot less of the finished illustration out there. I mean, it was in its heyday at the turn of the last century, when magazine publishing got to a point where it was king, and there was a large audience that knew how to read, and had a day off a week, and had a little bit of spending money, and there were no movies or TV or ra-dio. Magazines were everything. It’s always been evolving, but we’re at the point where there’s a lot less of the finished stuff just because they’ve gone on to other things now.
DRAW!: The interesting thing is, as the market is shrinking, you have these smaller vanity press operations, like the one that you’re doing, the retro private eye—
GO: Yeah, that’s the deal with Hard Case Crime. They realized that the artwork was part of the packaging. They realized that when people buy the detective books and the Carter Browns and things, it’s because they like the whole package: the artwork, and the story, and the small paperback, you know, “I can carry it around in my pocket,” whole thing. They realized that the cover is one of the selling points, so that’s why that is part of the deal. DRAW!: How much of your time is spent looking for work as opposed to working? Do you have an agent, or do you not have an agent? A lot of people used to have agents, and now I don’t know whether it pays to have an agent.
GO: It paid us in the beginning mostly because the agents, if they’re decent, it’s their full-time jobs. They know how often to bug the publishers, and how to bug them.
We went to New York in the late ’80s and contacted a bunch of publishers, and even the ones that really liked our work and wanted us to bug them said, “If we don’t call back in a couple weeks, then you call back in a couple weeks.” And they’d say, “Oh, call back in a couple weeks.” And it would
(far left) Glen’s rough sketch for the box art for ComicBase 7, a program for organizing a comic book collection. (left) Glen’s value comp of the proposed box art.
Glen takes multiple shots of his models to get different expressions and poses for reference when it comes time to paint.
get to the point where you felt like you were bugging them. It’s like, “Well, you told me to call.”
The decent agents were there in town where the art directors were, and they knew how often to bug them and what was ex-pected. So, no, it was actually really helpful in the beginning. I don’t know if it’s as much of a thing now, with the Internet and how easy it is to get your artwork in front of somebody, but it probably is a similar situation as far as, “How often do you bug them?” Some of it’s timing, being there in the Rolodex when the job comes in that they think about you.
It’s a little different now, and that’s part of the thing with the teaching is that the teaching keeps things consistent. That way, when everybody calls all at once, we have to do a little juggling, but when everybody stops calling at once, then we can focus on the teaching 100%. That’s the exciting thing about freelance is it’s not overly consistent. It kind of goes in waves. DRAW!: The other thing I find about teaching is that it keeps you actively engaged when you’re having to help students. You do two things: you re-teach yourself principles, and you keep the mind sharp for having to solve problems, because that’s what the illustrator is doing is solving problems. I find that you’re constantly solving a problem, maybe the same problem but from different angles, because everybody has different issues with drawing.
GO: Yeah, I think that that’s really the secret to the good il-lustrators, the good artists; it’s not the ability to draw or paint, it’s the problem-solving part of it. What worked on somebody else’s piece, and what am I trying to get across, and how do I do that… it’s a little bit more cause-and-effect than people think that art is. They think of it as something you’re born with or not born with instead of a skill. You go to a cabinet maker who makes cabinets because they have a craft for it, and they’ve worked at it.
DRAW!: People just think it’s like you were born with some magical ability where you just, ding, touch your finger and magic comes out and the job’s all done.
GO: I know. It’s insane. I mean, we all know how to read and write—well, most of us—and we assume we have to go to school to learn how to do that, or at least get training some-how, but somehow the artwork is considered as, “You were born with it, or you were not born with it,” and I don’t under-stand where this came from.
DRAW!: We were talking about how things have really changed. GO: When I think about things changing, the one thing that I always remind myself is that Norman Rockwell used to talk about the fact he felt that the Golden Age of Illustration was done and over by 1923. [Mike laughs] So, yeah, that’s always
(left) Glen’s underdrawing, which he will paint over. (above) Glen’s 3" x 5" color comp.
my reaction. We think of him as being dead center of it. So part of it is perspective. Part of it is, yeah, it was different, but what’s still going on? You mentioned the concept work. I mean, there’s some amazing stuff going on in the concept field that’s not on the cover of a magazine, but….
DRAW!: You don’t see it unless they do an Art of… book or something like that, but there’re people out there just doing really amazing work. I forget, there was a guy who had a site called goodbrush.com, and he did this pre-vis stuff, and it was just amazing. Because usually work that’s done on the com-puter, when you look at it, you go, “Oh, computer. That was done in Painter.” This guy was really good. When you looked at it closely, you could tell that it was done in Photoshop, but at first glance that’s not what you thought.
Now, you’re still doing, from what I’ve seen, pretty much straight, traditional stuff. Are you incorporating the digital as-pect into your work?
GO: Nothing other than as a glorified Xerox machine. I use it for layouts and stuff, but mostly it’s for cutting and pasting and trying things out that’s easier than doing freehand, to save me some time. But, for the most part, I want to get it out of
that machine as soon as possible so I can draw it or paint it. Yeah, I like the actual brush in my hand.
DRAW!: I’m right there. I think that’s actually one of the big-gest issues that we face as artists now, not only commercial artists but even fine artists, is the fact that we are deluged with imagery all the time. The demand of the industry sort of drives the way the work has to be delivered. You don’t send
(above) Glen’s initial sketch for his Punisher cover.
(right) While shooting the photo reference, Glen sees a better crop for the cover.
(bottom right) An idealized sketch of the photo reference.
your paintings in to the publisher anymore, like Rockwell did. You have to somehow get them digitally scanned in or what-ever. There’s a lot more of that that’s actually on you now, as the artist, to be able to use FTP and all of these other things. I can sort of see a generation gap just because of the digital aspect. Like, a lot of the people that you or I would teach, maybe they don’t quite have the love for the original. I love having the brush. I can do digital and I do, but I always default to having what I call the “meat world” item. I like the piece of paper or the canvas.
GO: It’s like the argument of comics going online. We who grew up with comics are always saying, “Well, it doesn’t feel
the same. It’s not the same as having it in your hand, and the smell of the paper, and it’s your thing.” But, on the other hand, if they never knew that sensation, then they may not miss it. DRAW!: Do you find that to be an issue with your students at all?
GO: No, I’m finding it to be the other way, actually, that I’m getting some people that really only have an interest in digital or computer work, but they come to take classes with real drawing and painting so that they have a better con-cept about manipulating the shapes and values so that when they’re working in the computer, they understand what it is
(left) Glen’s new cover sketch and his color comp for the painting. (above) Glen’s underdrawing that will guide his painting.
that they’re actually moving around. They’re not waiting for the computer to have a special program to draw it for them. So, the ones that are actually, I think, doing some really in-teresting stuff, recognize the component of the real world that should be in there too.
DRAW!: Two points. One, when I can look at an illustrator or painter, I can always tell if it was an artist who developed before Technicolor. You can also tell if people only learned to do coloring on the computer because you’re seeing light being projected at you, not light
hit-ting the surface and then com-ing back to you and hittcom-ing your eye. If you look at the artists who developed before Technicolor, their understand-ing of color was not influenced by cinema, so it is different. It is different. And then you look at people who have developed post-technicolor, and they are very influenced by the colors that you see in movies or TV. I think it is really important for the young artist to learn about color, but not learn about color on the computer. You know, use the computer, but learn about color before you’re us-ing the computer.
GO: Yeah, it’s all the stuff around you. I remember lis-tening to an artist at the So-ciety of Illustrators out here. He’d lived in New York, then moved out here, and when he came across one of his old palettes from 20 years earlier when he had been in New York, he was stunned at the difference in the color. He was a landscape painter, but he was stunned at the dif-ference of the atmosphere
around him and how it changed the way he viewed color. So I’m sure if that’s the situation, then it’s the same sort of thing. If you grew up looking at the computer screen versus whatever your color influence is, your view is going to be tinted by your surrounding.
DRAW!: Speaking of that, do you think of how you use color in your illustrations for the covers of a comic book as opposed to a romance or a western? With a comic book cover, are you thinking to punch the colors up ?
GO: Well, yeah, it has to be. I mean, with the Rockwell thing, I don’t believe he was referring specifically to coloring; he
was talking about storytelling, but he always referred to it as like throwing a ball against the wall and it only comes back half as strong as you threw it. You have to say it a little loud, because you know when they reproduce it, it’s going to lose something. So you’re trying to figure out what the message is, and then you have to be a little noisy about it so it still reads. Part of it is, figure out what the story is. In a way part of the reason that we had more fun with the detective stuff than some of the superhero things, there’s the component of storytelling on the westerns, the detectives. You have kind of free rein to do whatever you want with the color schemes, whereas with the superheroes, you also have to throw in that most of them come to the game with their own color scheme attached al-ready, so if you’ve got Super-man standing next to the Hulk, you’ve got to pay attention to whether or not these colors look like crap together.
DRAW!: [laughs] Right, right. When you look at back to when Neal Adams started coming on the scene, and he started using those K-tones or grayer tones when he would color covers, the color had a big effect on me. So I was wondering if you did indeed think about the differences. When you’re working for DC, do you submit a layout to Chiarello or the editor? What’s your process like? GO: You know, it is different for everybody. It just depends on what their working meth-od is. Usually not so much submitting the color. It was always different working for Mark, because he is an art-ist, he was speaking my lan-guage, so…. I would get very odd comments from people that were not artists—“Make sure the baby is cute and creepy”— things that didn’t always work together. [Mike laughs] With Mark, he would tell you something that was actually English, and it’s like, “Oh, this is going to make sense.”
Occasionally, art directors like to see the color roughs and things, but generally it’s more just, “Make sure it’s scary,” or night, or whatever, more than instructing us to be 50% gray and 6% purple.
DRAW!: Because of the way everything is all wired up, be-cause you can do a comp and send it quickly, they can say,
The finished painting for the Punisher cover.
“Oh, change it.” They can ask for a lot of tweaks because they can just keep asking you to send them the images. Do you find that to be more often the case, depending upon the client? GO: That’s the one saving grace about having clients for a number of years is you kind of know which ones are going to be a pain in the neck and which ones are going to be a pleasure to work with. Usually when they want to see every little nuance and every little detail, they’re more hassle than they’re worth, so hopefully they’re going to pay enough for it. DRAW!: Do you have a limit? Do you have a contract that says, “You get three changes, and after that I have to start charging you by the hour,” or…?
GO: I should, but no. No, when it gets nuts, we just try to avoid those people in the future. [Mike laughs] I mean, when it gets stupid, usually it’s not to that degree. Usually what we’ll do is we’ll get the script or the synopsis, and we’ll send them several stick figures or basic drawings saying, “How about this?” and, “How about that?” We can narrow it down so that if we need models or whatever, we can go get the right references and costumes as necessary. If they need to see a tighter sketch, if it’s going to be a big deal where they need to make sure that everything works before they get to the fin-ish, then…. But we’re not usually working for those sorts of clients. We are usually a little looser and send them some stick figures, and especially if they’ve seen our work, they start to trust us after a while that we’re going to give them something that looks decent.
DRAW!: Do you have a standard way of working? Do you do a couple of thumbnails at the start? How many choices do you give them?
GO: Well, it depends on the deadline. Usually I like to at least try a couple. The last couple of Stephen King jobs we did, we sent in six or seven ideas, but it’s usually two or three. But I haven’t done a comic cover in a couple years actually. We’ve been so deluged with the retro sexy girl thing that I’ve been happy to focus on those.
DRAW!: When you do your comp, do you hire a model, or do you just draw it straight out and then hire a model later on? GO: It just depends on what’s going on. Whatever it takes to get the idea across. Usually it’s either basic enough that I can make it up, or I can shoot a couple of quick snapshots of Laurel or me in the basic pose. I also keep a scrap file of ideas that I think are really cool so that when a job comes in I can flip through it and have a jumping off place. You know, I might have a great pirate image that I could also use as a great cowboy image. That way you’re not working with a blank picture all the time.
DRAW!: Do you always work in a certain way? Do you like to work with pencil? Do you do the thumbnails in color or in black-and-white?
GO: Usually the rough sketch is just a pencil sketch. It will occasionally include tone if we think it’s going to help sell the concept or sell the mood a little bit more. It’s more a matter of value, because we don’t want to deal with the color again.
(above) For the cover of 1997’s
Resurrection Man
#1 from DC, Glen painted these heads of the main character, which were then used as a lenticular image—an image that changes depending on the angle at which it is viewed—within the eye of a full-page skull. (left) Glen’s photo reference for the project.
Resurrection Man ™ and © DC Comics.
I’ve had clients that have said, “Well, this part could be more Im-pressionistic, and this part would be more realistic,” and at this point we’re just trying to figure out if it’s a guy on a horse or a girl on a Buick before we worry about style and that kind of stuff. So it’s a matter of trying to narrow it down.
But mostly we read through the script, or, if we can come up with a simple scribble right away to give us a general idea of where we’re going, and if it’s possible to tighten it up from there, we will, and if not, we’ll say, “Okay, this idea I think works, but I could make a more convincing sketch if I shot a quick Polaroid of one of us in the pose.
DRAW!: How do you and Laurel Belchman, your partner, actually work together? How do you divide up the labor of the process? GO: Most of the time, if it’s Laurel’s job or my job, we’re mostly playing backup for the other person, so it’s not so much dividing up the work. The ones that we did together—both of us physically working on the actual final painting—had a lot of times more to do with needing to get it done because we were running behind. We both trained with the same teachers, so we can work similarly enough so that it works. But usually, if it’s a general job, it’s one of our projects. It’s not so much that we’re always the studio. So if it’s my job, she helps me out, and if it’s her job, I try to help her out. And then, usually, we just kind of work together on every part of it. Whichever one is painting it, if we run into trouble, the other one is there for input, to see if something seems to stand out funny, or if an area looks like it needs a little bit more attention. We don’t pick up the brush and work on the other person’s piece that often.
DRAW!: Your hands aren’t crossing over each other as you’re painting on the same painting at the same time? [laughs]
GO: Well, we have done that. We did a couple of Batman covers that way, where literally she did the left half, and I did the right half, and we met in the middle. I mean, that’s more do-able when you’ve gone through all the preliminary stages together, and you’ve worked out the color reference together, and you’ve got your reference and your idealized drawings worked out.
DRAW!: I guess the Hildebrandt brothers worked that way; they would work on the same things together.
GO: That’s what I understand. I don’t really know much of the de-tails of it. I got the impression that it was basically they would take shifts—one would work while the other one slept—but I wasn’t there, so….
DRAW!: So you do your comp, get that approved, and then you go out and spend time hiring the models. How long do you take? I mean, do you have an average time, or is it just how much time the client gives you? Like, you’ve got two weeks, or a month? GO: It depends on the project. Usually we try to get it where there’s enough lead time in there. Right now I’ve got half a dozen things that go through the beginning of next year, so it’s easier to juggle things. But generally if it’s less than two weeks, or the amount of research and stuff that we’ve put in—it’s mostly those that are going to be a pain in the neck, especially if I’m teaching half the time.
The thumbnail sketch and photo reference for Hard Case Crimes #11, Branded Woman, by Wade Miller.
We get the sketch to work out so that we have a clear idea of where we’re going, and then, yeah, we’ll get the models in from that point. If it’s going to be something where it’s fo-cused on a really ideal model, or a superhero model, or some-thing that is really primo for the perfect statuesque type or something, we’ll focus on getting a good model for that, and then, for all the background characters, we’ll use friends and people that are good at hamming things up. But we can usu-ally pay them in doughnuts and pizza.
DRAW!: Do you redraw the image on canvas? Do you proj-ect it onto a canvas?
GO: It depends on the piece, but all of the above. If it’s going to be minor changes, then I’ll work things up, cut and paste in Photoshop, and project it up. If it’s going to be changing my 5' 8" model to a 6' 5" Superman, then I’ll do up a freehand drawing, then I’ll project my drawing up to the size it’s going to work. DRAW!: I don’t know if your teacher worked in the Frank Reilly method at all. Is that part of your process?
(left) Using the photo reference, Glen idealizes the figure of the woman, then superim-poses it over the figure in the photo.
GO: Well, not per se. I mean, not to the degree of mixing up ten values of red flesh and yellow flesh—
DRAW!: Yeah, where you have those strings of all your flesh colors.
GO: No, it was more a matter of understanding the concept and then just paying attention to whether or not you were sculpting with a light pattern or with a dark pattern. It was more a matter of recognizing that half of your battle was a three-dimensional, sculptural issue, and half your battle was a two-dimensional value and shape issue. So that was more where the Reilly stuff came in. It wasn’t taken that far. DRAW!: That was something that I would hear about, and now you hear about it a lot. And some of his older students have put out books on the Reilly method, but until the last couple of years, I never took classes at the League or any-thing, so I didn’t really know what they were talking about. GO: Reilly was really all about trying to make some sort of system that you could teach to people. He felt that instructing music for instance had certain rules about scales and things that you could teach, and he wanted to make some hard and fast rules about value, and edges, and shapes. There were al-ready some in existence, but he was just trying to put it into a nice, neat package so that it was workable.
When our teacher went to school there right after World War II, most of the guys there were on the G.I. Bill, and they had two years to learn it or pick another career, so they were trying to figure out how to get to a point where they could make a living in a short amount of time. So Reilly was really all about trying to figure out how to make it logical and a little bit more cause-and-effect and step-by-step than so much into the theory of the artistic end of it.
DRAW!: I guess he was very practical.
GO: Usually the complaint I hear about Reilly’s color is that it’s not good color. Well, that wasn’t his deal. His deal was to control the value, and then you could go play with color if you wanted. But it was more about the, “Did it work in black-and-white” contrast?
DRAW!: Which comes out of Howard Pyle.
GO: Yeah. And that’s the one thing with Howard Pyle: within ten seconds you know the story, and you’re looking at the right parts of it, so that you’re not getting lost by some extra-neous detail that’s distracted you.
DRAW!: Do you always do a color comp, or do you sometimes just wing it?
GO: We usually do a color comp. We do kind of the
abbrevi-(previous page) Sketches for the cover of Batman: Legends of the
Dark Knight #121. The center
image was the chosen idea. (left) A value study drawn on tracing paper.
(above) Photo reference for the Batman figure.
(right) Glen used this Batman action figure frozen in a block of ice to get a feel for the way Batman should look in the painting.
ated thing that Rockwell did. If time is the issue—and it usually takes me longer to get to the painting than to do a painting— if I know what my color scheme is going to be and what the effect is going to be, and I’ve obviously already got my layout and my values worked out, I can spend
my painting time focused on designing the shapes the way I want them to be solved so that I can make a cool drawing out of it, so I can make nice design areas so the brushwork looks the way I want it to look. I’ve already worked out all the rest of that stuff. I’m not juggling 47 things. I’ve already solved those problems, which is part of what Rockwell was doing with those photos. He was already illustrating when he called the model in there.
DRAW!: Oh, yeah, very much so.
GO: He was thinking about the lighting, and the pose, and the angle, and it wasn’t so much about getting something he could trace. He was illustrating before he turned the camera on, and that way he had a lot of the problems worked out so that, by the time he got to the painting, it was all about just crafting a beautiful cabinet. You know, he didn’t have to in-vent things without having a plan worked out.
DRAW!: Right, and especially with the way he was working. I mean, he wasn’t a broad artist, say, like Harvey Dunn; even Cornwell was much broader. He could be tight, but Rock-well’s stuff had a very fine focus all over, so if he didn’t, he’d have weird holes in his paintings.
GO: Yeah, but he also did know where to direct your eye. Ten years ago they had—I don’t know how many paintings it was—the Rockwell show that was traveling around the coun-try, and I was surprised at how many of the pieces had really loose areas that I’d never noticed before.
DRAW!: Yeah, I saw the Rockwell show at the National Por-trait Gallery—it was of the collections of the paintings that
(left and above) Photo reference and the ideal-ized figure sketch for Mr. Freeze.
(next page) Color comp and underdrawing for the LODK #121 cover.
Batman, Mr. Freeze ™ and © DC Comics.
Spielberg and Lucas own—and the guy was just an incredible painter. There’s a lot that is actually lost on those covers as far as paint handling, surface, color.
GO: Oh, yeah.
DRAW!: On the covers you can’t see the paint-handling, and they were using the best printing they could. They’re so much richer in person. The colors are so much more dynamic and richer in person.
GO: Oh, yeah. Well, that’s always the case. I always find it interesting that people like Dean Cornwell and Rockwell and all the really top illustrators were illustrating to impress their fellow illustrators, but their client was the guy on the street who was looking at the story and really didn’t necessarily see the craft involved.
DRAW!: Vincent Desiderio calls it the “technical narrative.” Rockwell’s technical narrative was so good that you were under his spell without even noticing it. You were just sort of swept right in.
GO: Right. And that was kind of the point. If you noticed that you were being told a story, then the magic was gone. You’re not supposed to notice.
DRAW!: You were saying that, out of, say, a two-week dead-line, it sounds like at least a week is just getting all the stuff ready so you can actually paint it.
GO: Yeah. Getting the ideas worked out is usually the hardest part for me—going from nothing to something—and that’s where it’s really good working with Laurel. We can sit and bandy ideas back and forth, and then when you sketch them out, you can tell
whether or not it feels like it’s telling the right kind of story. And then you try to figure out how you’re going to make that work. Do you need to shoot a certain kind of reference? Do you know of some reference you have stuck away somewhere? So it’s better to spend a little extra time getting the photo reference to work. In fact, when I was doing the first couple of Spider-Man/ Batman pieces that I had, you basically had a choice of going from a guy in a Speedo and making up some fabric, or a guy in a costume and making up some muscles. Which way do you want to approach it?
With a couple of the really, really black costumes, like the Punisher, with the early ones I would take the guy and paint him without his shirt, and it was a nightmare to try to go from white flesh to rendering some-thing that had a really small range, that only went up to a mid-grade. So we found some models that were willing to let us do a little body paint here and there, and sometimes an extra half-hour of discomfort for the model saves me hours of bullsh*t when I’m painting.
DRAW!: I guess that’s one of the biggest differences between doing superhero stuff and doing regular illustrations. I was just at the Andrew Wyeth studio the other day. He had actual costumes, and he had stuff from his dad in there too. N.C. Wyeth actually had somebody sew up a Robin Hood costume.
That also brings up an interesting point. Painting a detective novel or a western paperback cover, you kind of have your Zane Grey idea or whatever, but when you’re painting Spider-Man or you’re painting Bat-man, are you thinking like Neal Adams or John Romita? It’s a different thing because there is already this world that really has been incredibly illustrated for, like, 60 years now.
GO: Right, but it’s also generally only been illustrated in pen and ink, and it’s kind of like the first time you hear your favorite Sunday strip cartoon character on TV and the voice is never what you think it’s supposed to be in your head. I mean, there’ve been more people painting these days painting more realistically than there used to be, but when I would look at trying to flesh something out more realistically, but I’m starting with a John Buscema or a Neal Adams, there’s a bit of a gap between the line drawing and the finish that you’re trying to achieve. You’re having to change things drastically to flesh it out. Basically, if it’s a superhero char-acter that has a history, I’m mostly pulling out the images of what I think the guy is supposed to look like, and I stick those all over the place so that I’m inundated with the image, but when I sit the model in front of me, I try to A) find a model that’s sort of in the direction I want it to go, and B) push them farther in the direction I want them to go.
DRAW!: Today, with the cosplay thing, every time I’m on the Internet there are all these people who have better and better and better cos-tumes. It used to just be fat guys and nerds wearing costumes, and now it’s hot chicks wearing them who look like Wonder Woman. You go, “Wow, I can hire that model.”
GO: Even so—you’ve done the illustration bit. Even if you get the model perfect, you still have to improve on it. Nobody’s as perfect as they are in the book.
DRAW!: Everybody’s neck is always too short. [laughs]
GO: Yeah. I saw one guy at the airport that I think was about an eight-heads-tall character, he was 6' 2", 6' 3" or whatever, but he looked like a pinhead. I mean, what we expect as the ideal figure on paper is kind of scary in real life.
DRAW!: Yeah, that’s true. That’s why when you see a fash-ion model photographed, it’s like, “Yeah, it looks great.” And then when you actually see a real fashion model, they look like birds. They look very strange in real life.
GO: Well, that’s mostly because the camera’s seeing with one eye, and we see everything with mostly two eyes, hopefully. We’re seeing a little to the left and a little to the right of each thing, so we’re slimming things down when we see them in real life that a one-eyed camera doesn’t. So the models have to compensate by being ultra-thin.
DRAW!: With costumes, do you not put the folds in? I mean, we never draw the folds other than on Bat-man’s cape and a few little things on Superman’s trunk, but in reality, if the person’s jumping around or mov-ing, you’re going to see that amount of—
GO: That’s when you fall back on Rockwell’s idea about anything that doesn’t help the story hurts it. You’re trying to figure out when you squint at the reality in front of you, which parts of it do I want to keep, and which parts of it do I want to play down so that it doesn’t get in the way?
Part of the Rockwell puzzle that people seem to completely gloss over is that you never look at a piece and think, “What the hell’s going on here?” Within ten seconds you know the story. You’re immediately look-ing at the kid, or the dog, or the grandpa, or whatever. He bends over backwards to make sure that he doesn’t confuse you.
DRAW!: Would you say that it’s harder to do the
su-perhero stuff because of that, or that it’s easier?
GO: It’s just different. That’s been kind of the fun thing about doing the superhero work, you’re kind of pushing the Greek god version of people. You’re trying to make them the most perfect icon of whatever the image that you have in your mind is supposed to be. But it kind of seeps in when you’re doing a detective novel, and you want it to be just a heroic guy. You’re looking at the model in front of you, you’re making it
look like the guy in front of you, but you’re still throwing a little of that Greek god thing in there and deciding how much of it to include. It’s just with the comics you can push that stereotype pretty far, and then, when it’s supposed to be more realistic, then you have to decide how far to go that way. But it’s actually kind of cool. It makes you feel a little bit more like you’re the driver instead of the passenger when you’re looking at your reference. You’re deciding where to go in-stead of just saying, “Oh well, that’s what was in front of me, and I was just trying to copy it well.” Every person doesn’t see your reference, they just see the final result, and they don’t really care whether the model’s costume fit them well or not. They have to see the final image come to life for them.
DRAW!: If Superman had really hairy knuckles or something. [laughs]
GO: Yeah, I don’t need to know that. That’s not the issue.
DRAW!: If you pick up an issue of Eerie or Creepy from 1970, every great comic book artist was in there. You had Adams, and Toth, and Colan, and Frazetta, and Williamson, and Wood, and all the top Silver Age guys would be doing work on those maga-zines. I’m wondering if we will ever get back to an era like that in comics.
GO: It’s going to be a com-bination of things that lets it happen. You know, at the height of classical music in Beethoven’s era there were different stimuli and oppor-tunities than exist now for that kind of music. I mean, part of it isn’t just some-body sitting down, saying, “I’m going to do this and make it wonderful, and it will sell.” That’s a big chunk of it, but it’s also a matter of whether or not the universe is laid out so that those things can survive. DRAW!: I saw that you were teaching the gouache class, and that looked really awesome. I would have loved to have come and sat in on that class. Are you working in gouache and oil, or mostly just gouache?
The final painting for the cover of LODK #121.
GO: Most of the finished covers these days are in oil just because it is easier. The gouache is the medium we learned in, because it’s what Fred [Fixler] did for his movie poster career, and it’s part of what they were doing when they were in school.
But the advantage to gouache is that, if you use it well, it forces you to design everything you put down. You can’t be quite as sloppy without actually paying attention to what you’re designing. It’s more direct if used more opaque in terms of if you want to turn a form; it’s not just a light and a shadow and then smearing it. You’re actually trying to fig-ure out what the shape in between is, and if there’s another shape in between that, and how do you make them not look cartoony?
DRAW!: When you look at people like Coby Whitmore, it’s amazing to look at his originals, because they’re rougher than you think. The reproduction smooths everything out. In the original you see all this dry brush crosshatching, kind of like Wyeth.
GO: Right. It made you pay attention to the shapes. You don’t get to a James Bama Doc Savage finish without being able to start with his gouache training, where it made him pay atten-tion to the shapes before he went nuts with the detail.
DRAW!: My friend Ricardo Villagran is really good with the gouache, or the tempera as he calls it. He’s an old-school guy, and he really has that finish. He’ll paint something, and the
next thing he smacks a little edge on something with his fin-ger, you know, to soften a transition or whatever.
But I really admire the way you do the gouache because, like with Ricardo’s work, sometimes you look at it and it looks like it’s oil. And when he was done, he would seal it or coat it, and then it wouldn’t look like oil.
GO: Which actually makes it easier to scan. That’s the one issue with oils is the damn reflection.
DRAW!: When you do oil, do you scan it, or do you shoot it? GO: I have it shot. The place that I’ve been going to for 25 years has shifted over to digital, but they still shoot the things just because the scanner can’t get the colors and values right. So far I haven’t found anybody that can control it intelligently so it looks nice.
DRAW!: I take it it’s oil on board, right? GO: Yeah, yeah, just on illustration board.
DRAW!: In oil your dark colors will tend to sink in. So do you work with a medium, or, like, a retouch varnish or some-thing to bring them back up?
GO: Retouch, yeah. I just use turpentine and then spray re-touch varnish or real varnish if it’s that long.
DRAW!: Do you work with that as a medium, similar to what Rockwell did, where you do one part turpentine, one part stand oil, and one part Damar varnish?
On the left is a two-minute demo drawing done in one of Glen’s classes, and on the right is a 15-minute demo.
GO: For the retouch it’s half-and-half, Damar and turp, but I’m kind of lazy. I didn’t experiment a lot with it, it just works, and I know it works, and I just leave it alone. The trick is to make sure that you get the painting dry enough to be able to deal with that phase of the work.
DRAW!: Do you do an ebauche, or do you do a warm gri-saille underpainting and then work, or are you working pretty direct over your drawing?
GO: I usually have my little color roughs, which has worked out the values. When we get our drawing worked out, and our photo reference, and we’ve idealized everything, I’ll just slap some tracing paper over it and make sure that the light and dark patterns make sense in value. And then, when I do my color rough, I make sure I pay attention to my value rough. But when I blow it up on the actual painted board, I have a map in my comp of where I’m going to go with it. So, for the most part, I’m wor-ried about the sculpture of my drawing more than the values in the beginning, and then I’ll just wipe enough tone on there to get rid of the white, and then I’ll just take sections and paint them in pieces. You know, I’ll do the upper half, or the arm and the sec-tion around it, or whatever it is, because I have the comp for the big effect. I just make sure that I use it as a road map.
DRAW!: How do you prepare your surface? What kind of surface do you like to work on?
GO: It’s just an illustration board. I’ll do two or three thin coats of gesso—enough to give it some texture and protect the board from the oil. But that’s mostly from the gouache background where we just got used to working on the board. It’s nice to work on something that doesn’t bounce around too much. DRAW!: Do you use Crescent?
GO: Yeah, yeah.
DRAW!: Four-ply, or the illustration board?
GO: Three-ply, although it sounds like they’re starting to not make it anymore, so I’ll have to find out what’s going with that. DRAW!: Somebody else told me that. My friend Bret has a bunch of old Whatman board, and that stuff was great. But the Crescent is not as good as it used to be. It’s like they don’t have the same amount of rag content in it or something. GO: Right, right. Which is not as big of an issue for us if we’re going to just do it anyway, but still…. None of the prod-ucts seem to be going in a better direction; they all seem to be doing what they can to cut corners.
Two of Glen’s more finished life drawings.
DRAW!: So you tend to work on sec-tions? Do you do that the same way whether you’re doing the gouache or the oil? Or, because gouache dries faster— GO: With the gouache, the cool thing is that you can go into it 30 years later with a wet brush and keep on working with it—once you know that you’re working opaquely. You know, if you’re going to do something that’s big and brushy and wet into wet, you plan that ahead of time, but everything else you’re going to be paint-ing directly, so it doesn’t really matter. Basically, I would just paint a section of it. Actually, I would get the overall effect so that you can see how some-thing looks in its universe and can tell whether it’s falling down or needs more attention. So, generally, it’s the same way, it’s just with the gouache, you could decide to go and cover the whole thing if you wanted, whereas with the oil, if I want to work in sections that are still wet enough to work into each other, I make sure I don’t take on too big of a chunk that I can deal with in a day.
DRAW!: I take it you’re using a digital camera now to shoot every-thing yourself?
GO: Yeah, it’s too cost prohibitive not to.
DRAW!: And then usually about a week to paint the cover?
GO: It varies. At the most. Usually it’s three to five days. Once you’ve worked out all the mechanical things, it’s just a matter of sitting down and designing the paint. So occasionally it’ll take a week, but usually it’s more in the four- or five-day range.
DRAW!: Depending on how many figures, and whether it’s the Battle of the Bulge or just Batman on top of a building?
GO: Exactly, yeah.
DRAW!: Is there a dream job that you’d like to illustrate?
GO: Back in the day, it probably would have been the John Carter thing, because that seemed….
DRAW!: I guess they kind of screwed that up, huh?
GO: Yeah, well.
DRAW!: You could still do it. I mean, you could still do it in comics, I guess.
GO: Yeah, but at this point it’s cool that we get to do the retro thing. You know, when I was going to school, most of the guys that we really looked at a lot were doing the different paperback covers, so even though there’s a lot less paperback work out there than there was in the ’60s, a lot of it so far, knock on wood, has funneled down to us.
DRAW!: Well, that’s because all the old guys went out to the West and became Westerners.
GO: Again, it’s evolution. It just keeps on going. It’s like the F.R. Grugers and the guys who became the newspaper artists at the turn of the century, they would go to a scene and take some notes and go back to the office and draw the front page of the newspaper from memory. The guys that were in school at that point, training for that job, by the time they got out of school and got into the field, that field was gone, so they went into serial illustration or whatever. And by the time the guys who were in school studying for that got out, some of that was going away, and they had to go into another field. So it’s kind of cool that we get to actually do the thing that we thought was cool in school.
DRAW!: And there has never been a better time in our lifetimes to be a figurative artist than now, because there’re also a lot of galleries. I mean, you’ve got the whole Southwest
cowboy art thing. You have all the galleries. In fact, we’re going up Sat-urday to the drawing show in Arca-dia where they have Aron Wiesenfeld and a lot of guys like that, so there is still an emerging fine art market for people who have the skill to do narrative paintings.
(left) Glen’s rough thumbnail and two sketched ideas for the ComicBase 16 box art.
GO: It’s funny, though, because a lot of the guys that I went to class with, as well as some of my students, have gotten into the gallery world, but they try to avoid using the term “illus-trator” because it doesn’t sell as well.
DRAW!: I think that’s dying out. GO: You think that’s changing?
DRAW!: You always got the feeling people like John Buscema were ashamed to say they were comic book artists or some-thing, but now if I tell people I work for Marvel or Disney or DC or whatever, people are like, “Wow!” And the gallery I’m in, the owner tells people. That’s one of his selling points. It used to be, if you were still drawing a comic book, or you were still painting a paperback, you weren’t a real artist. But I think that’s all blurred now, because the geek culture is actually popular culture now.
GO: Yeah, we’ve taken over.
DRAW!: Well, Bill Gates and all those guys have taken over, so geek culture now is popular culture. And the gallery world is also changing. Have you thought about pursuing that yourself?
GO: From time to time. A lot of the guys that I personally know that are in the field, I know what it took for them to get going in it. So there would be that lag time of getting rolling in it. And I really like seeing the book covers and having an image on them. There’re certain things that you get to do on the covers that sometimes are a pain in the neck, but there’re things you get to do that you wouldn’t necessarily get to do in a gallery. I mean, I suppose you could, but it’s not too often you get to do Martians attacking Earth.
DRAW!: You could be Glen Orbik, the Painter of Martians. [laughs] The Painter of Light is gone, but now we have the Painter of Martians.
GO: There you go. Yeah, it’s also a business. I know that gal-lery artists kind of get into one area, and it’s best to stay there and not move around too much just because people like to know what they’re buying. There was a well known artist out here that did a talk a while back showing some of his more recent paintings, and they were gorgeous, but they were not really the subject matter that he was most associated with, and at the time he wasn’t able to sell any of the new stuff be-cause it wasn’t what people thought of him as doing. I don’t
There are actually only two models in this photo layout. Glen took several shots of his models in various poses and composited them in Photoshop into the layout for the final painting. Glen then penciled his underpainting from the composite photo layout.
