"Siegfried and Brünnhilde"

It's a constant struggle to keep up a portfolio, for me it is anyway.

Between client work and my projects (Ticket, Walters, Grimm, Terrible Yellow Eyes) I tend to not often have the time to do individual pieces. Don't get me wrong, all of those projects have been incredibly rewarding and fun to do but there's a certain thrill that comes only from doing a single piece, no part of a collection or set or story but one image.

I have a sketchbook. It's square. And in the front there's a little spot of paint that I got from Greg Manchess' painting demo last year at Comic-Con. I carry this sketchbook around with me all the time and I also misplace it all the time. But when I do have it with me it's where I make all my plans and write out my ideas (and future projects) and that all works out pretty well. When I don't have it with me I doodle on whatever I find and tuck the paper into the back pocket of the sketchbook whenever I find it again.

One of those ideas on a stray piece of paper in the back pocket was the beginning of this piece :

Siegfried and Brünnhilde

I'm very happy with this because it is the fulfillment of an idea I had some time ago (and stuck in the back of my sketchbook) and I also completed it during an entire 24 hour period (otherwise known as a "day" + night)

I spent a long time trying to figure out what scene should be in the upper portion of the piece. I went with a moment from the Wagner re-telling of Siegfried and Brünnhilde when Siegfried, a youth who does not know fear, awakens Brünnhilde who was put to sleep in a ring of fire by Odin.

The idea behind the piece is that, to me, Opera is at once silly and serious. Silly in its high seriousness and yet the costumes and music and yes, even the 30 minute singing death scenes conspire somehow touch something incredibly beautiful. That's what I wanted for this piece.

This is one of a several new prints I'll have at Comic-Con this week and on my store when I get back.

Walters : the first 10 pages

As promised, here are the first 10 pages of Walters, my 40 page story in Flight 6.

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Next post : What I've been doing for the last couple weeks -- a lot of new work for Comic-Con!

Walters, writing the story visually

Once I had the story all scribbled and written out, I set to making my thumbnails and storyboards.







This was the part that was most important. I think I made it through this part in a week's worth of evenings. Originally Walters was a 60 page story. When I showed my first draft to Kazu, he suggested that I look for places I could condense the storytelling and combine pages. This turned out to be the best piece of advice I got for the project. Once I managed to get the story figured I got it down to the tightest 40 pages I could.

Truthfully, that was all the hardest part. Drawing is what comes most naturally to me so it was all down hill from there. Here's a shot of a several of the drawn spreads :


From there, as you might expect, I painted all the drawings. I watercolored pretty fast and loose. When I know that the final product is going to be digital I tend to only worry with color a little and just concentrate on getting the textures and values I want.



One a side note, I'll have several of the original watercolors (which will include a print of the final page or spread) available at our booth at Comic-Con.

From there I went to work on doing the finals. At this point it was early December. The work was due in the second week of January. I had gotten the first 30 pages completed when I decided (actually I think Erin suggested the idea -- this one's for you, sweetheart) to go to final. I knew I'd have at least a solid week over Christmas to finish drawing the last pages I needed to complete. I got the first 25 or 30 pages done when disaster struck in the form of shoulder dislocation. I knocked it right out which meant that I was out of commission over Christmas, I couldn't even move my arm until about a week and half afterwards. It was stupid.

In Spider-Man, Peter Parker calls his abilities his "blessing and his curse." This is exactly how I feel about my right arm. It's an essential component of how I do what I do; drawing is my great love. But my right shoulder is also the thing that keeps me sitting over in the corner for fear of dislocation. And I don't know what it'll be like when I'm 50. Will it even work then? I've had 2 surgeries and more ER visits than I can count.

Well. Determined to not not work I played Zelda all Christmas long. I played the original "Links Awankening" on the GameBoy. It was, in a single word, awesome.

When we got home I worked with sling-ed arm. I could make small movements so I worked all over the paper by moving myself around. Does that makes any sense? I couldn't reach my arm very far, either way. But, I say all that to say after a couple more weeks over very late nights I had the entire 40 page story of Larry Walters completed.


I was a little nervous about showing the final story to Flight veterans over on the Flight forum. I believed in the story, of course and I knew that I had done the best art I had ever done but I mean, these people are some of the greatest writers and artists working!

I received some incredibly kind words from people that I have enormous respect for. I was blown away by the supportive comments my story got and it was unbelievable to think that these artist and writers I admired so much enjoyed my story as much as they did. Once I knew everything was working I took my first night off in nearly 4 months and played Mario 3 the rest of the night. It was great.

All in all, making Walters has been a tremendously rewarding experience and I very much look forward to putting together my story for Flight 7. And I've got a ton of ideas.

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I'm not able to show you the entire story but tomorrow I'll post the first 10 pages for you see.

Thanks for stopping by!

Walters, writing the story

When I finally settled on the story of Larry Walters, I knew one thing for sure, in every possible way I meant this re-telling as a tribute to his life. It was a crazy idea, who would have ever thought something like this was possible? Yet Larry did. Is it cliché to say that Larry followed his dreams? He did, he followed his dreams, how else do you say it? -- He wanted to fly his whole life but couldn't be pilot (you'll see why below) but why is that cliché? Maybe the phrase is but certainly the actual act isn't. As Larry said when he was arrested, "A man can't just sit around." What on earth has to be cliché about going out there and doing something awesome? He had a dream and he made it happen. That's a million times over what most of us ever do. A few years later Larry was quoted as saying,

"It was something I had to do. I had this dream for twenty years, and if I hadn't done it, I think I would have ended up in the funny farm. I didn't think that by fulfilling my goal in life — my dream — that I would create such a stir and make people laugh."

There's nothing cliché about that. It's incredibly admirable.


Yes, I did a lot of research and tried to find the facts and yes, some of them are conflicting. Some say he soared to 11,000 feet, some 16,000. There aren't exactly any books about the event but there is some information to be found online. Those facts weren't as interesting to me, I don't care if it was 15,000 feet or 16,000. The complete story however is simply amazing.

Larry couldn't be a pilot due to his extremely poor eyesight but he always wanted to fly. He got the idea to fly when he was thirteen. He saw some weather balloons in an Army/Navy store and twenty years later he bought 45 weather balloons and tied them to a lawn chair. Larry intended to rise a hundred feet, hang out, and then shoot some balloons and sink gently back down. What actually happened was much more startling. Upon release, he climbed approximately 1,000 feet a minute; that's 16 feet a second. What really gets me is that this man who had very poor eyesight LOST HIS GLASSES almost instantly. That is terrifying to me. Larry reached an altitude of approximately 15,000 feet. He traveled from San Pedro to Long Beach airport and flew around 45 minutes before crash landing in some power lines near LAX. He was then arrested.

The thing that caught me instantly about Larry's story was losing the glasses. The glasses were the thing that kept him from what he wanted, to be a pilot. And to loose them so soon in his flight... What on earth must he have seen up there?

I wanted to use the skeleton of the story as a platform to springboard off and explore episodes Larry's youth, his relationship to the sky, and his relationship to his glasses.

Yes, Walters is about Larry's story but it's a fictional and fantastical retelling of the story. I've taken many liberties in the telling. It's meant to be a piece of period fiction, historical fiction, if you can count the 1980s as a "period." I mean it as an homage to an incredibly inspiring person (he even named his lawn chair "Inspiration I") and I hope you'll enjoy. The episodes told in flashbacks, and in the sky are completely fictional. The only real truths are that a man named Larry flew a lawn chair and what breaks my heart is that he killed himself several years later.

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When I write out a visual story, doing storyboards for animation or something like Walters, a graphic novel, I write everything out. I scribble this and that and walk my way through the story in sentences before I ever start to draw. I don't know how other people work but this is the best way for me.




The story I found after working for several evenings, put simply, is this : It's the morning of the flight, and Larry remembers pivotal moments in his childhood that have lead him here. He then takes off and confronts the sky.

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I knew two things for sure; I wanted the sky to be as much of a character as Larry and the glasses would be an incredibly important element. The glasses were (obviously) what kept Larry from his dream but when they were off what was it like?


I imagined it to be a violent and aggressive world without the protection of his glasses. This takes the form of the sky when Larry's glasses fall off in a moment in childhood (in my story.) As if his whole life the sky had been trying to catch him, allure him, and wanted to keep him.

There is something up in the sky, and we'll meet both sides of the sky a little more in depth in the next post.

Next post, writing the story in pictures / dislocative disaster strikes!

quick update /my handwriting in the Coraline trailer

The last two days I've meant to get back to my Walters posts and I do promise before I leave for San Diego I'll have them for you. Things have been so wild and crazy with getting work and prints and originals ready for SDCC that it's been impossible to do much else. That and real, live client work keeps me busy. Thanks for waiting, I hope to tell you some about writing the story and creating the art.

But! I wanted to show you guys this -- My hand writing font, Blue Goblet is used to advertise the release of Coraline on DVD. Awesome! :



Thanks for stopping by! I should get a break tomorrow evening from the madness so I hope to resume my Walters post then. I do these big long posts (however infrequent) as much for me as anything else, really, so I remember. Remember what it was like at the time during the project. Much like my two terribly long posts about Le Cadaeu du Temps and others. Creating Walters was a wonderful and such a rewarding experience. I look forward to getting the time to tell you more and I hope you enjoy the story when it's released in Flight 6 in just a few days.

The True Story of Larry Walters, or How I came to make a 40 page graphic novel

This story begins way back in the summer of 2005. I just graduated and had started to work full time for Portland Studios. My first company trip was up to NYC to attend BookExpo. It was a massive convention of book sellers, authors, you name it. BookExpo was a lot of fun; we ran around NYC, threw portfolios at people, and got to meet Peter deSeve in his studio.

One of the most surreal experiences (outside of meeting Maurice Sendak) was walking on to one of three enormous show floors and coming face to face with a giant poster of book cover I had done.

While I was at BookExpo I met Kazu Kibuishi. We talked for a bit and he gave me a copy of Flight 2. I gave him a business card. One of my abiding memories of that summer was Kazu telling me then that if I had any stories to contribute to Flight, I should feel free. At the time I didn't feel I had anything to offer. In any case I figured he was just being nice. What I'd come to find out is that Kazu is not only nice, he's extremely generous and a very kind person.

Several years past and with the releases of Flight 3 and Flight 4, the books were just getting better and better. Still, I didn't feel like I had anything to offer, that and I taken the "invitation" as just something nice to say, more like an off handed comment. It was a nice thought though, that I could remind myself of whenever I was frustrated with my work.

That summer, the months of June and July, I set to work on what I think, outside of Le Cadaeu du Temps and possibly The Ruin of the Beast, was my most ambitious project, at very least my biggest personal project yet, Ticket.

As I was finishing up the work on Ticket something made me think about Flight and Kazu. I looked him up online and found his email. I also saw a little note on his site saying they don't accept unsolicited contributions to Flight.

I went back and forth about emailing. I knew how it might look, unprofessional, like, "Hey! Look what I did!" I wanted to show him Ticket, show him how I'd been inspired by his work and Flight but I really didn't want it to come off like I was submitting a story. Finally, I decided that I'd write. I sent him a few spreads and told him about Ticket and how we'd met a couple years before and explained that I wasn't submitting anything but just wanted to say hi. See, with Ticket I felt I had finally been able to make something. Come to find out he remembered me! And he even remembered the drawing on my business card. Also that the offer to contribute still stood.

We met up last summer at Comic-Con and as I tried to buy his book Amulet (he refused my cash and gave me a copy as a gift) he introduced me to a few people and said, "This is Cory, he'll be joining us in Flight 6."

Well, that was a mandate for me to come up with something greater than I had before, I was not about to let Kazu down. He'd been so kind as to invite me. There was no way I wasn't going to do my best to make something great and reach further than I thought I could.

The whole flight back to Greenville from San Diego I was thinking about what I would do. I ran through a lot of ideas. After several weeks of drawing and thinking and drawing and thinking I settled on an idea inspired by a song, Walters, by Pinback.



The song told the story of Larry Walters, you know the guy. He's the one who flew a lawn chair with weather balloons. He flew from San Pedro, CA to Long Beach (near the Los Angeles airport) and spent close to 45 minutes in the sky before he crash landed in a bunch of power lines and got arrested.

What I wanted to do was tell the story of what happened during those 45 minutes.

Next post : Writing the story

Friday/Saturday

For me it's still Friday I think, I worked all night on another new piece for the San Diego Comic-Con (which is getting closer and closer.)

I'll post about all these new pieces next week, towards the end of the week. I'm terribly excited for them.

In other news, I finally, finally, finally put together a decent online gallery :


See you Monday with a peek at Walters, my 40 page contribution to graphic novel anthology Flight 6!

fairy queen : watercolor stage 2 / final

Here's some bad photographs of the final watercolor.

What I ended up doing, after being disappointed with where I was with it at this stage, I went back and drew over the entire thing in a dark blue pencil. The blue helped the brown and really pulled the piece together for me.

Here's a better quality image, the scan :

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This painting has worked out for 3 different things, one as an original I'm pleased with for Comic-Con, to reproduce as a print, and finally as the cover of my 2009 sketchbook,

Princesses, Monsters, and things that fly.

It's taken quite a while to bring together all the work for this little book but I finished it last night and it's going to be great. Just over 50 pages at this point. It's doodles, drawings, and a couple finished pieces all in one little book.

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Here's a question for you and if you like, you can comment an answer :

For the print of this piece that I'll have, would you like to see it just the straight, original watercolor? Or a version more like the cover of my sketchbook.

Thanks everyone!

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Next week's postings : Walters, my 40 page graphic novel story coming in Flight 6 and a couple other pieces I'll have for the SDCC.

fairy queen : watercolor stage 1

I started out this piece meaning to not go much further than a very light watercolor, just simple washes but of course I'd screw up one area and paint to dark or too finished and have to work over the whole piece to make it match.

I got to the end of the painting at this stage and was unsatisfied. The brown pencil I typically work in just didn't feel right, the upper right side of the painting really bothered me -- the grass was proving to be tough to get and I hadn't been able to get the lanterns to glow like I wanted yet. I had an idea, and we'll see it in tomorrow's post.

Next post : final watercolor

fairy queen : final drawing

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Next post: the watercolor, stage 1.

fairy queen : thumbnails / roughs

There's something that we were missing last summer at Comic-Con: originals. With that in mind, I began working on at least 2 original watercolors to have this year (and I believe Justin will have a couple as well)

I've finished the first and I'm about to begin the second. For the rest of the week I'll be blogging the making of this first one.

Here's the original idea, thumbnail and rough.



Next post, the drawing.

And speaking of originals, I'll have some of the original watercolors from Walters, my 40 page story featured in Flight 6.

"Good morning!"

"Good morning!"

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I can't think of anyone who doesn't love The Hobbit. And I also can't think up any new accolade that hasn't already been heaped upon the book, the characters, or Tolkien himself.

That being said, I wanted to do a piece inspired by it just for fun. I enjoy this moment, it's just a quiet morning but then a wizard shows up.

August commission final

Here's the final painting from the August commission. You can see part 1 and part 2 here.






This was an enjoyable piece of work to do and I thank Burgin for thinking of me.

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Also be sure and check out Terrible Yellow Eyes today!

August commission - part 2

After the drawing, the next step was to paint it.

Pretty light washes.




Next post : the final painting.

August commission

Recently I was commissioned to do (what I believe) is my first true portrait.

Burgin Streetman has a blog called Vintage Childrens Books My Kid Loves, a wonderful collection of (imagine this) vintage childrens books.

She commissioned me to do a portrait of her son August. Over the next couple days I'll post the steps in the process, posting the final painting on Friday.

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First off, Burgin liked my Red coat painting and she was interested in commissioning the portrait of August with that piece in mind.

I started with my traditional blue pencil under-drawing, just quickly figuring my proportions.


From there I simply finished the drawing.


Next post : the painting

updates :

Been a busy last few days, a lot of it spent with new work for the San Diego Comic-Con at the end of July. If you're out that way I hope you'll stop by because Justin and I will have a lot of cool stuff there. I'm not sure of our booth number yet but once I get that I'll pass it along.

I'm trying to juggle client work and coming up with several new pieces in time for the convention. There's a lot to do on all fronts, that and I wrecked a watercolor last night that I thought was fool-proof. Well I fooled it up alright, it's laying over in the corner now. But tonight is a new night isn't it?

I've been excited putting together my 2009 sketchbook, Princesses, Monsters, and Things That Fly -- It's been a lot of fun pulling together work from months ago and some entirely new pieces for the book.


We've also got a few little surprises for SDCC this summer, I've got several new pieces in the works that I'm doing specifically for SDCC -- some original watercolors that I'm bringing to the show.

Also, I'm nearing completion on my Hobbit inspired illustration :

(detail)

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And a big thank you to those of you who have bought some of the original drawings from Grimm and Other Folk Tales! There aren't too many left but my favorite is still there.

Thanks again, everyone.

Hobbit tribute : Gandalf (detail)

Here's a detail of Gandalf, in progress.

As a kid I saw the old animated Hobbit and liked a lot of it. I don't think I liked Bilbo's design quite as much, but I did really like Gandalf. I'm sure in the back of my mind that was the inspiration.

What I enjoyed about the animated version was how faithful they tried to be to Tolkien's original illustrations. That's something that I wanted to be mindful of as well -- Tolkien's own illustrations for the Hobbit are beautiful and I love his line work. His drawings and watercolors owe something to Kay Nielsen, an artist I have immense respect for and have learned a great deal from.

Bilbo

Here's a quick update from my Hobbit tribute piece -- the drawing and watercolor underpainting, a detail of Bilbo. There's no finished work yet.


I'm working on this piece at night because my schedule (thankfully) is slammed during the day. Should be another couple nights at it and I'll be able to post the final piece.

Thanks for taking a look!

small watercolors

Hey everyone, just added a few new little watercolors to the store. Thanks for taking a look!

I spent the weekend working like mad on some more pieces, I got the "Good Morning" Bilbo and Gandalf tribute piece painted as well as several other new pieces drawn.

All in all a fine weekend (minus installing a new door to the upstairs bathroom, that was misery.)

the naturalist + zach

Here's a photograph and the thumbnail of another new piece I'm working on. I'm not entirely certain what it's about but I think it's something to do with natural history.

thumbnail

photograph of the drawing in progress

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In other news, Zach Franzen, at long last has started a personal blog. Zach is one of my favorite people of all time and a great friend. He is one of the most brilliant writers I've ever read and is also one of the most genuinely fun people to hang out with.

I think most people are only really good at one, maybe two things. Sure there's the odd person that's really an expert at three things but mostly I think it's only one. I think I've got one -- drawing. Everything thing else, (with the possible exception of my thoroughly useless command of Star Wars quotes) I'm abysmal. Zach, on the other hand, is an accomplished actor, vocalist, writer, and artist. He only is danged funny. Visit him over at A to Zach

some works for SDCC 09

I took a few pictures of some different pieces I've been working on.

Some are portfolio pieces, some are for my 2009 sketchbook (which I'll have available at the SDCC) some are just thumbnails at this point and some pieces are for new prints I'll have at the SDCC as well.

updated the etsy

Hey everyone, just a quick note to let you know that I've updated the etsy store with some originals : some drawings and a couple watercolors.

All of the drawings are from Grimm and Other Folk Tales, the supplemental drawings.


Thanks for looking!

Thank you for supporting Terrible Yellow Eyes.

I really cannot believe all of the staggering artists involved with Terrible Yellow Eyes. The project has truly become what I had hoped for but did not imagine exactly possible. When I think about the other contributing artists involvement and the level of jaw dropping work, it's really nothing more than a testament to just how bad people love Maurice Sendak.

The goal all along for Terrible Yellow Eyes was pretty straightforward; celebrate the book with pictures and invite (basically) everyone I would like to hang out and draw with to contribute.

But there was always a second goal, an alternate reason just sitting there, one that I never really mentioned (except to the contributing artists) but one that was supremely important to me : Mr. Sendak's 81st birthday.

When I began to seriously consider putting together something like Terrible Yellow Eyes I went to my friends over at Flight. These people are wonderful storytellers and staggering artists -- masters of visual and written communication, but not only that, they are also wonderfully kind. Kazu Kibuishi, a great friend and incredibly generous person, was the one who first invited me to contribute to Flight (Walters, Flight 6, this July!) and I'll take every chance I get to thank him again for that opportunity. But even more than that, Kazu offered a way to make my secondary goal a reality. His creative director also happened to have art directed Mr. Sendak before and knew him well and Kazu offered to pass the project on to him whenever I felt it was ready. June 10 was the day. As I understand it, the AD has indeed passed the site on. All I hope is that it might bring a smile to Mr. Sendak's face.

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Well, it has been a shining week for Wild Things, but does that mean the Terrible Yellow Eyes is over? Far from it. I can't be certain how long the project will go on but I'll continue to update every Friday so long as I am still receiving great work to post. There are several more amazing people still working on their contributions and I hope you'll check over today, I think we've got some of my most favorite contributions of the whole project (and that's saying something!)

The project will change some, however. My role will shift from contributor/curator to strictly curator. I've got many more projects to move on to and the San Diego Comic-Con is looming. There's much to prepare for that event (anyone going to be there too?)

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My goal all along for TYE was to honor the book, and express my love for it in pictures because I just couldn't do it with words, no matter how hard I tried. I've been humbled by the response of so many incredibly hard working, gifted artists. I think I can also say I've made a few new friends along the way.

Putting together Terrible Yellow Eyes has been the fulfillment of a years long desire to do something more than just enjoy Where the Wild Things Are. Maurice Sendak has influenced me and countless others so profoundly, so completely altering us and the face of what a children's book is and what the medium can be, it seems the only thing we could have ever done was to just celebrate it.

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I got to meet Mr. Sendak once, briefly, in NYC a couple years ago and got to tell him thank you; now, together, we can all show him thank you.

TYE mentions.

A few very cool Terrible Yellow Eyes mentions yesterday!


Irene Gallo had these terribly kind words for the project :

"...They are not just "re-draws" of the book. They are true, lovingly conceived and executed continuations of the conversation."

Thank you Irene.

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And over on the official Where the Wild Things Are, Spike Jonze film adaptation blog, We Love You So, we scored another mention :

"We’ve gotten about 1,000 emails about this site since we started this adventure so it seems only fitting to post it on Maurice’s Birthday. Terrible Yellow Eyes, paintings upon paintings upon sketches, upon drawings all like the one above inspired by Wild Things."

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Another by my esteemed friend and fellow gardener, Jamin. His blog chronicles all sort of things I'm afraid of. Actually just the rambles. Everything else is great.

because it just turned June 10 on the eastern seaboard

Here's a peek at the drawing for my Terrible Yellow Eyes painting tomorrow -- wait no, today. In 11 hours.

Be sure and check out TYE starting at 8 AM, every 15 minutes, a new contribution for the special Maurice Sendak birthday postings!