Month: January 2020

Folklore Thursday: Cray

Seymour Roger Cray was an American supercomputer engineer. Beneath his suburban home he constructed a series of tunnels. When Cray reached a creative impasse he would retire below. “While I’m digging, the elves will often come to me with solutions to my problem”

John Reppion on Twitter

“Whether we’re supposed to take it that Cray’s elves were literal Other Folk, or a kind of metaphorical muse I cannot be sure.  “

John Reppion on Patreon

I’m fairly sure: Cray was messing around. And I think we’re only just getting by with this as a folklore tale by the skin of our teeth. THAT said, having slept, ate, and breathed computers from an early age and always ALWAYS been fascinated by Cray super computers, I’m not gonna argue the point. If Elves are what he said, Elves is what I’m drawing.

Reading John’s tweets usually fairly quickly pops an idea into my head, and this idea appeared fully formed. Initially though, I drew the supercomputer in Cray’s head with a whole bunch of Elves working away at it, but then it felt wrong – we don’t hear mention of the elves until later in the tweet and so I didn’t want to spoil that fun surprise too early. If anything I regret not making the direction of Cray’s walk follow the reading direction, if I had time I’d redo it (and if a publisher comes along and wants to print the entire run of these things, I’ll certainly look at them all again…)

I can’t remember when I first heard or say a Cray supercomputer, but it was fairly formative. Look at that weird part alien, part Henge computer design (it’s actually more of a C shape, with a gap, but I stuck that in the rear view on this drawing). She’s a beaut. And, as time wears on and Moore’s law keeps progressing, she’s now only about a fraction of the power of whatever device you’re currently reading this on. Ain’t technology grand?

(Now If I can just convince John that Turing got his ideas from pixies, Ada Lovelace from Gnomes, and Steve Jobs consulted with swamp monsters then we could have a full set of technological folklorist…)

Process

Part of a regular cut-out-and-keep collection of Blogposts about well… process.

(I mean I say regular, the thing that really distinguishes my processes are they’re constantly in flux so it’s less a bunch of steps you should take as a bunch of things I’ve tried that have sometimes worked, sometimes not, but might spark a notion…)

I have a weekly whiteboard and I’ve been using a bullet journal the past three months. The bullet journal got a lot of use in its first two months, largely as I started writing thoughts down in it. But now my week is getting back in to a semi regular shape, so I thought I’d share it with you (and I write it all on my white board)

I’m trying to have reasonable targets for a day – nothing major, but enough to get stuff down and progress, and leave me spare time to do other things.

This week, for example:

Monday: read and layout a dredd script. – This is pretty light, layouts are exhausting, but this is the start of the new school term so the days still a little chaotic. (And, as it happened, I had time to pitch a short – four page – strip to a small press magazine and then write it up, at some point I’ll be drawing it [For the sake of talking about it, let’s call it “J”)

Tuesday – pencil two pages of the Dredd strip. My pencils are pretty loose, so in theory this is doable, but equally wife back at work, kids will be out of school, so there’s some big family to-dos in between times.

Wednesday – pencil two pages of Dredd. Tuesday and Wednesdays have similair structures. The biggest obstacle is usually me. Inertia and other things. Trying to keep other things to a minimum. (But sometimes they impose, like they’re already doing this week, but it’s ok! SLACK BUILT IN!)

Thursday – Pencils two pages of Dredd. No obligations on Thursday, and this should see Dredd pencilled. And I can start prepping for Friday.

Friday – Channel Hex day! Getting back to channel hex. Waiting on script revisions, so if they’re not here I’ll probably go back and redesign some characters and rethink the look of it.

Saturday / Sunday – I’ve another strip (waiting script) and I’ve set aside Saturday and Sunday as research days for it (that’s a light load, but family stuff may end up wiping me out at the weekend)

And that’s this week! Next week I’ll move on to the dredd inks, and try and up the ante.

A Month of Batman

On the run up to the New Year, I was thinking about some of the things that worked and didn’t work for me in the past. I’d spent over a year drawing WWII books, which was great fun, well paid, and I’m enormously grateful for the opportunity, but it did push me into obscurity a little and I need to make sure I’m visible both to the reading public and to editors.

So, I thought, I should try and think of big two books I could work on and do good work on. And then, from that, I should try and get some art of those characters in to my portfolio and online. And, to give me a bit of focus, I should take one big two property every month and just try and focus some fan art, some samples, and maybe even send to an editor or two.

January is Batman.

When I think Batman I think “nope, not for you Paul, that’s for artists that are better” and that’s pretty much my thought process when I think of literally any big two property. But that’s pretty defeatist. It’s also nonsense. Digging deeper in to it, I think there’s a slew of Batman adventures I could kill on – including, but not limited to, a Batman horror series (monsters? are you kidding? I’d be a perfect fit). Noir (heavy shadows? Yes please!) Comedy (come on, this is easy) and er… well, if I’m not a perfect fit on Batman, I dunno who is*

Anyway, that’s the thing. I’ll spend this month between paying work, and other projects trying to find things Batman related to draw – that may include mock covers, some sample art or just generally sketching.

This could all fizzle out by tomorrow, but you’ve gotta start somewhere, and this is it.

*Ok, the truth is given the right project I think I could do a specatuclar Batman, but equally, I could be bobbins – but you get nowhere thinking you’ll fail, right?

Folklore Thursday: Threshold

Crank up the manifest, hoist the gibbert, weigh up the anchorage. We’re back!

Having tried to push myself to do a little bit of writing over Christmas (you can see the results at my blog pauljholden.com) I thought I’d approach this first Folklore Thursday of the new year with an eye to creating some sort of story (and I mean more than just the surface thing). I started laying out the pencils to the tweet and found that, well, all I was really doing was illustrating John’s words. Not actually adding anything of significance. So I thought I’d add a character – that at least gave me a little agency.

Having adding something like a protaganist, I figured the easiest thing to do with those words was make him get younger – so he’s stepping back in time, but ONLY in his own lifetime. Then I thought – I don’t think that’s what John meant, but I liked the fact there was room to decide that’s what it could be. So then I added a little impetus to our character, maybe he’s finding this place and wants to travel back in time but he’s been tricked.

That decided, I started seeing what I needed to add to the art to sell that little narrative. I added a loved one in panel one (thus fulfilling something I’ve always wanted to do which is to draw a doomed romance comic) and then panel two I was going to have him drop a note detailing the cancer diagnosis of his wife. But then I wondered if I couldn’t add a second narrators voice, a conversation he was having. (or had had). Which would help explain what was going on for him. Layering and layering the story telling. I’m hoping it worked.

Also, that last bit of captioned dialogue is partly the response in the conversation he’s having with some unnamed person but also partly me having a little fun and saying to John [Reppion] har har, I tricked you – you thought this was going one way and it went another 🙂

I’m not sure what John makes of it yet. Could be he hates it (hope not!) but we’ll see.

Happy New Year, everyone!

(And bonus, the b&w version…)