Whither Holbein?

That day at the park the kid and I were tearing it up. He’s finally got the hang of throwing the stick, and I’ve gotten to like the taste of bark. He clapped his hands when I brought it back to him the first time and said, “Good dog!”

I AM a good dog!

–––––––––––––

Last week's entry - an innocent picture of a knees-bent confrontation - apparently raised eyebrows, temperature, hackles. The picture a few week's back of our hero inserting his proboscis directly into a canine's hindquarters was downloaded by more than a few as a screensaver. I offer this comparison as a simple fact, without comment. Or judgment. No judgment at all.

This week's entry should raise no objections, except from me. My beloved Holbein square-bound sketchbooks have disappeared from the shelves, and this drawing was done on different paper. Artists, like baseball players, become extremely superstitious about their equipment. If you're on a streak, you don't change nothing,

your paper, your pencil, your socks. But I think this picture looks about the same as last week's, so maybe I've been fooling myself all along. Or maybe it's the continuity in my socks that has salvaged this painful transition.

This week's dog is Jimmy, as sent by the lovely and talented Nissa Blocher. Thanks, Nissa!

One last note: more major-league publicity for Part-Time Dog is coming, although I will be obli

que and mysterious and not mention what it is. BUT I will beg and plead you all to please take a little time and send some emails, post some comments and forward on the NSDD to your loved ones because that would be oh so very helpful. Also, I think this project has now generated enough momentum to be attractive to a publisher, so if any of you know anyone I should talk to or you happen to be the shadowy but benevolent head of a large publishing conglomerate yourself, this would be the time to mention it.

More soon, promise. In the meantime, keep sending in dog photos (thanks to all of those I got this week!!), write me emails, make some comments on the blog, read the story so far or check out seltzerstudio.com. By the way, to see the Studio's portfolio in the same great format as Part-Time Dog, just click here.

Something Old, Something Else Old

The drawing this week is actually pretty old. It's the first direct pen-to-paper piece I did when I was starting Part-Time Dog, and I realized that, flaws and all, I liked its energy more than I did the more worked-over pieces I was doing at the time. Hope you agree.

In terms of new art, I encourage everyone to flip through the book in its entirety. I've tweaked pretty much every drawing so far, and completely redrew last week's page, which I wasn't entirely satisfied with. Actually, that page is once again the first version of the drawing I did, which in retrospect I liked it better than the more carefully rendered one I posted last time. Yes, a theme seems to be developing here.

This week's dog (find it in the book) courtesy Chris Mueller!

More soon, promise. In the meantime, keep sending in dog photos (thanks to all of those I got this week!!), write me emails, make some comments on the blog, read the story so far or check out seltzerstudio.com.

Open publication

Yes, Yes, Send Me Your Dog!

I got more response to my last mailing than any other NSDD email thus far. Everybody said roughly the same thing: Loved the dog pictures. Will you draw my dog?

To which I reply: Thanks, and yes! Send me your dogs. I will immortalize them. I'm studying taxidermy. 

No, no, no, dog owners -- Relax, that was only a joke! Send me pictures of your dogs and I will draw them and put them in the book. I need tons and tons of dog pictures, and your dog would be perfect, thank you. No dogs will be harmed in the making of these pictures. I promise.

In the meantime, I got such a good response to my pen & ink & computer color drawings that I have decided to proceed in the book using that technique. Here's the revised page 1, which I had to redraw anyway because of the shift in format. I haven't decided whether the rework what I've done so far or press on, but I'm leaning toward pressing on. 

More soon, I promise. In the meantime, please, please send me emails or make some comments on the blog.

Work and re-work

Sorry for the skipped day. I ended up reworking this picture a couple of times. The original version was too tightly drawn. I lost the sense of spontaneity that the subject matter requires. (The sketch I ended up using is shown below, by the way.) Also, now that I've decided to work with watercolor, I'm realizing that the artwork has to be conceived with a stronger sense of light. Originally, I was thinking that I would handle each page like a poster, with large flat areas of color, but with watercolor, that's really failing to use the medium.  

Finally, you may have noticed that the type has changed. It turns out that my handwriting can be fairly hard to read, something that should have been apparent to me in the last 39-odd years, but that somehow I managed to ignore. I will probably continue to play with the formatting for awhile, though.

More fun, tomorrow..

And we're off!

Here's an interesting story about this page. Well, interesting to me anyway. You may find it totally uninteresting, in which case you should mention it in the comments, or just send me a personal note ruining my day. 

My initial plans for this book were to draw and ink everything by hand, scan it all in, and add the color on the computer. That's how I did the cover, and that's how I do a lot of my illustration work. I even bought a beautiful little device called a Cintiq to help me do this. A Cintiq is basically a 21-inch monitor that is also a graphics tablet, so I can use a stylus to draw directly onto the screen. I recommend it to anyone who in the field who is questing for an enormous tax-deductible expense. 

But I actually decided to finish the page as a watercolor. Why? Well, here's the thing. I had a lousy scanner. When I would scan in a drawing - and I had to scan it in in pieces -  it would distort the damn thing, and the pieces wouldn't line up, so I'd have to spend an hour tinkering in PhotoShop just to get the drawing to look like the drawing. After only three, maybe five, years of complaining about this, I finally bought a really good scanner. It's an Epson Expression 10000XL, and I recommend to anyone who still has any money left over after paying for the Cintiq. And if you do, call me. Maybe we can go out to dinner sometime. 

Back to the point: Now that I could do fast, accurate scans, it occurred to me that I might as well paint the thing by hand and then scan it in. Believe it or not, I find it actually faster to paint by hand. I realize that this admission has just ruined my chances of every becoming a spokesman for Cintiq, but such is life. I like the chaos of a hand-drawn painting. Hope you feel the same. 

Incidentally, the lettering is all being done on the computer. I like it, but if anyone thinks it's too hard to read, this would be a good time to tell me.