Author: admin

We’re only at home when we’re on the wing (San Diego Comic-Con edition)

As I write this, my books have been shipped to a friend in San Diego, all of my display gear has been pulled from storage and checked, display shelves for books have been painted, and new price signs are printed and mounted. I’m giddy and anxious with the realization that I’ll be tabling at a comic convention for the first time in 28 months.

It’s not lost on me just how much I’ve missed this experience. Reuniting with friends and collaborators from everywhere on the planet, meeting folks I’ve known online in-person, and sharing my work with new fans, readers and friends…I’ve missed this.I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous about tabling at a very large show, just as another variant or two have reared their ugly heads. But the con has a number of health and safety precautions in place and I’m vaccinated, boosted, and got my second booster a couple of weeks back.

New Location

Instead of my usual position in Small Press (M-13, next to Mike Heffron’s Arch Blue at M-14 and Jim Heffron’s Lawdog Comics at M-15), I have a new home this year. You can find me at Small Press L-01. It’s only across the aisle from where I’m usually set up. I’ll directly across from Jim and Mike, instead of next to them, and I’ll have the excellent Barry Gregory and Gallant Comics next to me. Here’s a diagram: 

New stuff for the con!

I’ll have What We Say in the Shadows, a new quote book similar to the Ron Swanson Swansonisms book I debuted at SDCC last time.

 I’ll be bringing the Swansonisms book, and I have limited copies of the Elf Musings quote book I did last Christmas.

I’ll also have all six Athena Voltaire collections, including the latest volume, Terror on the Orient Express. In addition to the Orient Express trade paperback, I’ll have a few copies of the Kickstarter deluxe box-set of the book (which includes a signed and sketched-in copy of the book and a bunch of cool swag), and a few copies of the Kickstarter Orient Express Mystery Box, which contains a signed copy of the book, 2 mystery creator-owned comics by me, 2 pieces of swag from my other series, and a mystery 6×9 piece of original art. I’ll also have the Athena Voltaire Creators’ Edition, which features the script pages of issue #9 on the left-hand pages and the corresponding ink artwork on the right-hand pages. It’s a cool “making of” collection!

And I’ll have the first collection of The Catch, Ismael Canales and my comic about a skip tracer specializing in costumed criminals who skip bail. In addition to the trade paperback, I’ll have a deluxe box-set for The Catch, including the trade, a signed 4×6 sketch card, and a show bunch of swag. And I’ll have a few copies of The Catch Creators’ Edition, which breaks down issue #1 of the series.

I have a couple of new 11×17 prints for the con this year. One is a Kate Bush piece I drew for my partner a few years back (she’s a big fan) and the other is a Mandalorian piece. I never sell many prints, so I’ll be bringing limited numbers of these (and limited numbers of some of my other prints). If there’s one you’d like to reserve, please email me at SteveBryantArt@gmail.com to stake your claim and I’ll set a copy aside for you. And I also finished up my Rush series, completing Alex Lifeson late last year.

I never know what to bring

Books? Yep, the whole Athena Voltaire, Ghoul Scouts, and The Catch lines. Quote books? Yeah, as listed above. Prints? Select ones, sure.Original art? Yeah…some. I never know what to bring, art-wise. I’ll have my 9×12 Inktober pieces from a few years back (TV show theme), and I try to bring a variety of pages from high-end to affordable. But it’s heavy and, since I’ve been working digitally, there’s not a lot of new work in there. That said, I know a few of you have checked out the original art portfolios in the past. If there’s a piece you’d like, please email me and I’ll make sure to bring it for you. 

Happy Little Accidents

or “Steve Takes a Painting Class”

One of the acrylic paintings from my class.

From January 2022 to May 2022, I took an acrylic painting class. I hadn’t taken a class in traditional media since the mid/late 80s—a class in oil painting. In the years since, I taught myself watercolor and digital painting.

Here’s to adventure!

The first half of the semester was dedicated to workshops on techniques and exploratory exercises. Honestly, I’d have been satisfied if that’s all the class was. Too often, as creatives, we get caught up in the need to make art with purpose. There’s something incredibly exciting about experimenting and seeing where it goes without any further expectations.

For the second half of the semester, we were tasked with creating a series of paintings that incorporated some of the techniques we’d been workshopping. I wanted to apply some of this newfound knowledge to my existing stories/characters/worlds, so I opted for a series of Athena Voltaire pieces. I specifically wanted them to feel like a cross between lobby cards and concept art.

While my professor wasn’t exactly thrilled with my illustrative tendencies and tastes, she let me roll with this concept.

Since 2013, my workflow has included a significant digital component and I wanted to see if I could incorporate digital underdrawing to this series, as well. More experimenting!

My original grayscale underpainting. The composition is different from the final painting. Another advantage of a digital workflow is that if something isn’t working, revise, reprint, and try again!

I created a tonal underpainting digitally (grayscale), changed the art to sepia (sepia underpaintings have been a part of numerous traditional artists work for centuries), and printed that out on 2-ply bristol board, using my inkjet printer.

The underpainting converted to sepia.

I watered down some gesso to seal the image. Watering it down allowed the line work to show through.

Anyone with an inkjet printer knows what happened next: the image smeared once liquid was applied on top of it. And anyone who’s gessoed bristol board knows the other thing that happened: the paper curled up.

Through experimentation, I settled on the process: print to bristol board, apply a couple coats of spray fixative (to keep the image from smearing), spray mount the bristol to foam core board (to keep it from warping), and seal it with clear gesso (allowing the complete digital underpainting to be visible).

The sepia underpainting printed onto bristol board, mounted to foam core board, and trimmed to its final size.

Once the process was in place, I was able to start layering thin washes to build up value. Backgrounds were where I applied the experiments we’d workshopped in class: spatter, dripped and poured paint, and impasto painting.

Six paintings in all. Here’s how the rest of the series came out:

I think this is my favorite color scheme and background of the series.

Probably my favorite piece of the series.

Professor Benton Quinn from Athena Voltaire and the Terror on the Orient Express.

SIS Agent Desmond Forsyth from Athena Voltaire and the Brotherhood of Shambalha.
Detective Chang Apana from Athena Voltaire and the Volcano Goddess.

Why I love the Movie ‘ELF’

(and other tales of pop culture to the rescue)

I missed Elf when it released in 2003. I hadn’t watched Saturday Night Live since the mid-nineties, and neither Will Farrell or Jon Favreau were really on my radar. Truth be told, I don’t think I ever gave the movie a second thought.

Until I needed it.

The Sunday after Thanksgiving, 2007, my dad had a stroke. I was planning to head over and watch the Bears game with him that afternoon when I got the call from my mom.

He lingered for another thirteen days, but passed away on December 8, 2007. I got the call from my brother shortly after getting my daughter to sleep. I’m glad she was asleep, because I promptly lost it.

Throughout my life, my dad was a steadying influence, continually seeing the good in people. If we had poor service at a restaurant, he would shut my sniping down by reminding me, “We don’t know who they had to deal with before us.” That patience and level-headedness extended to parenting, and that was the approach I did my best to model.

As a single-parent sharing custody of a seven-year old, I suddenly felt lost. I loved my mom, but it was my dad whose advice had been invaluable to me.

My ex-wife had my daughter that Christmas Eve and I wouldn’t see her until Christmas morning. Sad and profoundly alone, I experienced the holidays blues for the first time in my life. The blues eventually gave way to channel-surfing, and I landed on Elf. If memory serves, it was airing on USA Network as a round-the-clock marathon.

I can’t remember where I landed in the story, but I watched it again on the next showing. And the next. And sometime early on Christmas morning, too.

It doesn’t take a trained therapist to see why this story of a naive man-child searching for his father and trying to build a relationship with him hit me so hard. To this day, I still fight back tears throughout the last third of the movie.

That’s right. Elf made me cry. It still does.

It gave me a sense of closure at a time I needed it. It gave me magic, too. And the simple connections, all told with heart and humor, still hit me today. It’s my favorite holiday movie. And every time I watch it, I think of my dad (although, to my knowledge, he never saw it).

This wasn’t the first time that pop culture came to my rescue, either. Just a couple months before, on a weekend when my daughter was at her mom’s, I found myself watching AMC’s Halloween programming. They were marathoning the Friday the 13th movies, which I’d avoided when they were new. However, that weekend, drawing comics and watching Jason terrorize group after group of teens in a repetitive morality play, I fell in love with the slasher genre.

Comics got me through awkward junior high school phases, and The Three Musketeers and The Man in the Iron Mask guided me through a post-breakup summer in high school. Stories have always helped me process my feelings. That’s probably why it’s so important for me to share that love of storytelling.

But, yeah, Elf. I’m feeling the sad coming on, and I think I’m due for some quality time with Buddy the Elf.

Drawing Blind: Aphantasia, part 1

For years, I never understood the idea that people could draw what they see in their mind. I thought it was a figure of speech, and possibly, was tied to having developed a great observational eye that allowed them to remember vast amounts of information about things they saw. 

I spent decades trying to accumulate a mental library of visual elements based on observation. No luck. I’ve never been able to recall visual details of any piece of art by memory—not even favorite pictures by favorite artists. Drawing a loved one’s face by memory? Not a chance.

This inability to develop a skill that I heard others talk about really played into my imposter syndrome, and has dogged me throughout my career.

Tarzan sketch by Glen Keane.

I first heard the term aphantasia in 2019, when I came across an article on Disney animator Glen Keane, who has it. Aphantasia is described as one’s “mind eye being blind.”

Adam Zeman, professor of cognitive and behavioural neurology at the University of Exeter describes it, “People with aphantasia can think about an apple, or a front door or a loved one perfectly well, but they just can’t bring to mind the visual image of that thing or person.”

Mind blown.

Reading that first article was a highly emotional experience for me. For years—decades, even—my inability to retain visual information and recall it when drawing was something I always viewed as a personal failing. To learn that it was something that couldn’t be fixed with hard work and hustle was a relief.

As a child, I loved to draw. It wasn’t an intellectual exercise or about trying to improve my craft. Through repetition, I got better, but it wasn’t a conscious effort. It was just a kid having fun.

The older I got, the more that improvement became my goal. Somewhere in middle school, I learned about blocking in—the process of lightly laying out a composition without detail. When I’d block-in, my drawings would be filled with light scribbles, in an effort to “find” the right lines and shapes. I’d eventually develop a composition out of the chaos, and that composition would lead to a pretty good drawing. That was my process for years.

My first indication that there was something missing came at a comic book convention when I watched artist Steve Rude doing character sketches for fans. I idolized Rude and stood in line, waiting for my turn to have him sign comics and to commission a sketch from him. Watching him, I was mesmerized by his decisiveness and efficiency. There was no wasted motion, no struggling to find a line or define a form. Instead, Rude’s process of blocking in a figure was executed with surgical precision. I was hypnotized. 

That became my goal. I wanted that kind of observational eye, that kind of mental library where I could access that knowledge and apply it as precisely.

In the ensuing years, I was crushed over and over by my inability to retain observational details. No matter how I tried, I was never able to break free from having to sketch, scribble, and scrawl my way through a layout. It never got easier, and it felt like I never got any better at it.

And thumbnail layouts are just as bad. I marvel at artists who are able to create 2” x 3” layouts indicating decent anatomy, staging, and environments. For me, it’s always a wall of scribbles that ends up with some mildly discernible figures on top of it. 

As I mentioned, this fed my imposter syndrome. I’d find workarounds (photo reference, drawing and refining on multiple sheets of vellum to create a more refined or confident underdrawing, working on a lightbox, etc), but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I really was just a fake.

Learning about aphantasia was incredibly liberating. I’m still trying to understand more about it, but for now, I’m just relieved to know why I never got any better at retaining imagery.

This is an ongoing exploration for me. I’ll probably write more about it in the future. 

The Invisible Audience

I have an incredibly talented friend—far better drawing chops than me. When we talk about collaborating on a book and releasing it, once the topic turns to promoting it via conventions and social media, he lays out a detailed scenario of soul-crushing scorn. In this scenario—whether online or at a convention—someone gets confrontational about his work and scoffs, “If you’re so good, why aren’t you drawing X-Men?”

Finally, after decades (yes, literally decades) of hearing him predict this nightmarish scene, I asked him, “Did you have an experience like that at a con? Was someone really that rude to you?”

I asked because I’ve been setting up at conventions for over 3 decades. I started exhibiting at GenCon in 1989 when I began working in the RPG industry, and, for the last twenty years, have exhibited at various comic conventions. I’ve also been active on social media for twenty years, first, sharing my work on message boards, and later, via Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. And never once, in all those years, have I gotten that kind of treatment. Ever.

And let me tell you, my gaming artwork was pretty rough.

His response was simple. No, he hadn’t received that kind of treatment, but he fears it.

I get it. My brain constantly tries to trip me up on a daily basis, creating anxiety about everything from taxes to the old “Did I leave the stove on?” stressor. But the Invisible Audience situation is an insidious one.

The Invisible Audience scenario is that paralyzing feeling you get when you begin to imagine people looking at, reading, or consuming your work in general. It can be people you know, but more often than not, it’s this ambiguous, faceless, and unknown entity. And that makes it all the more terrifying.

I told you the story about my friend, but I’m not immune to the pitfalls of the Invisible Audience. Last August, I got a new sketchbook. I’ve never been great about keeping a sketchbook, but ever since I went digital for the majority of my professional work, I’ve wanted to start experimenting in a sketchbook again. Of course, it’s a great way to maintain a relationship with traditional media, but it’s also a great way to explore, challenge, and generally grow as an artist.

I mention that I’ve never been great at keeping a sketchbook, and the truth is that I’ve only ever filled one sketchbook. Every other one has been abandoned at one point or another.

Care to guess why?

That damn Invisible Audience.

Even now, nearly a year after I got it, my new sketchbook—the map of creative exploration that I was excited to chart—sits empty, unused. Why?

Because I can’t think of a cool image to kick it off.

The empty sketchbook. It sat unused for a year due to the insidious Invisible Audience.

That’s the dumbest thing, right? Because whatever I draw in there is going to be part of the process. There’s no guarantee that anyone EVER will look at this sketchbook. No one’s ever asked to look at my previous sketchbooks—not ever the single sketchbook I filled.

So, yeah. It sits. Empty. Mocking me. 

I don’t have a problem with diving into “publishable” work—which people actually see—but when it comes to the self-study work that no one’s guaranteed to look at, I stress myself out over it.

But I’m working on it. I plan to ignore the Invisible Audience this summer, and get started on that sketchbook. You’ll have to trust me on this one, because I don’t plan on sharing it here.

If you’re being tripped up by the Invisible Audience in your own creative endeavors, you’re not alone. And you’re probably worried about nothing.

Good luck!

Extra! Extra!

I’ve recently finished writing Afterwords to two trade paperback collections of my creator-owned work. Both of these essays covered the history of the project—including stops-and-starts, previous iterations, and even missteps.

While writing these, I asked myself why it’s so important to me to document all this stuff. Is it an exercise in self-indulgence? Is it that I’m actually pretentious and feel that the minutia of what I do needs to be shared with everyone? Or is it something else?

I realized that, as with many aspects of my creative approach, it comes down to Rush.

I’ve written before about how the Canadian rock trio has influenced me as a creative, and I’ll probably do so again in the future. 

The first page of Neil Peart’s liner notes from the 1985 tour book for Rush’s Power Windows. My hefty 12×18 scanner managed to get most of this 12×12 book in frame.

My love of documentation for a project can be traced directly to the tour books that Rush produced during my formative years. Created as 12” x 12” 32-page glossy books, the tour books kicked off with an essay by drummer/lyricist Neil Peart,  offering insights into the writing and recording process. Equipment lists by all three band members (Peart, bassist/vocalist Geddy Lee and guitarist Alex Lifeson) followed. The books were capped off by a series of concert photos.

Another page from the Power Windows tour book, Geddy Lee’s equipment list. Over time, these equipment lists still contained info about the equipment used, but also developed into short essays highlighting the band members’ quirks and sense of humor.

The tour book cover design replicated the corresponding album cover art, and, at the same size as the 12” vinyl albums they discussed, these volumes shared space with each record in my collection. They were, in a sense, an Afterword for each album. 

When seeing other bands in concert, I was disappointed to learn that this kind of tour book was an anomaly. 

I’ve carried this love of insight into the creative process with me for over thirty years. In fact, one of the motivators behind me buying a laserdisc player (back in the day) was the additional audio track where directors, cast, and screenwriters discussed the behind-the-scenes process of the movie. When those commentary tracks became standard with the advent of DVDs and Blu-rays, I was in heaven!

Art books that detail an artist’s process are among my favorites, too. Step-by-step in-progress images, photo reference used, thumbnail sketches, alternate versions, color studies, value studies…any and all of it is exciting to explore. And the more of it, the better!

And that brings me around to comics. 

I’ve always been a mediocre collector, at best. Bagging and boarding comics was never my favorite part of the hobby. I latched onto trade paperback (and later, hardcover) collections early on. My favorites were—you guessed it—the ones that provided additional information on how these stories were created. 

I never tire of this. Learning more about how art I love is created is endlessly fascinating to me. It certainly carries over to the books I’m making these days. I think about what I would like—as a fan—in the work of creatives I love, and try to make something that matches my expectations. 

Athena Voltaire returns to Kickstarter!

Athena Voltaire and the Terror on the Orient Express has launched on Kickstarter!

This adventure follows Athena as she reunites on board the luxury train. As always, danger follows our globetrotting aviatrix wherever she goes. Here’s a sneak peek:

There are a few other pages in this opening sequence, but this should give you an idea of where we’re going.

This exchange, in particular, between Athena and an old friend, was a blast to write. It intentionally doesn’t pass the Bechdel Test, because I wanted to stress just how different Athena is from her contemporaries—even people who she’s known since she was young. 

This sequence (7 pages in total) was penciled by Unai Ortiz, inked by me, and colored by DC Alonso. The rest of the Orient Express adventure is drawn by Abel Cicero, with the ever-talented Mr. Alonso providing a consistent look with his excellent colors!

Please give it a look!


Done is Better than Perfect

Years ago, I tried my hand at music. I made friends with a couple of brothers who had a band. Each of them, independently of one another, asked if I wrote any original songs, instead of just playing cover versions of songs. When I said that I had some bits and pieces of songs laying around, each of them—independently again—said “Those bits aren’t gonna finish themselves.”

Such a simple thought, but that’s some of the best creative advice I ever received. Just like giving yourself permission to fail, and building a daily creative habit, learning how to finish your work is another important step toward making comics.

DC won’t let you take over Batman on the strength of the two pages you’ve written. Marvel won’t give you an exclusive contract because your partially penciled page looks great—no matter how amazing those two panels are—even without backgrounds! And Scholastic won’t make you the next Raina Telgemier or Jeff Smith on the strength of an unfinished outline and character sketches for your YA masterpiece.

None of that will happen until you start finishing stuff.

There’s a saying, “Done is better than perfect.” I’ve heard it used in relation to Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, who claimed they had it painted on the walls of their offices.

Before we talk about what this means, lets talk about what it doesn’tmean. It doesn’t mean that you should hack out a bunch of mediocre stuff. 

Remember that.

So what does “Done is better than perfect” mean, then? It’s meant to remind us that the pursuit of perfection can lead to paralysis. It’s meant to remind us that building a body of work involves creating a body of work, not just one perfect piece. It’s meant to remind us that we have permission to fail if we’re going to grow creatively—you’ll learn more from making a finished failure than you will from an incomplete masterpiece.

Since we’re talking about creating comics, here are a couple of comics legends on perfection. 

Jack Kirby said “Damn perfection,” and John Buscema famously said “Throw your eraser away.”

So go and finish something this weekend!