Design & Execution

I recently picked up some stellar drawing advice from the Shouting from the Basement , blog of Green Arrow comics artist and writer, Ande Parks.  Inking Made Easy Here, in my semi-humble opinion, is what makes good comic book inking, in five not-so-easy steps: Draw, don't trace. You don't have to be Frazetta , but you have to know what the forms are and how to contribute to them. Always. Make confident lines. We don't want to see you tentatively feeling your way around. Make every line like you know it's the right line. Vary line weights. If all your line weights are the same the work will be flat. Fat, bold lines next to razor thin lines makes stuff POP. Texture. Develop & consistently apply visual shorthand for textures. Complex or simple, they must be convincing. Wood, steel, cloth, etc. Saved the most important for last. Help tell the story! Spot blacks. Separate visual planes. Keep things clear. Story > pretty lines. There. Now you can all g...

My recent drawings  have been part of a three-part installation for Buffalo Exchange Colorado. The other two pieces are open-ended, topic-wise. The second piece grew from my mental image of the Buffalo Exchange store in its new location on Broadway in central Denver, which I have never had the pleasure of seeing in person, so it remains an object of surrealism for me. If any work of art inspired the subject matter, it is probably the giant tiger roaming New York in Jonathan Lethem's novel Chronic City . Not to worry; the tiger doesn't really affect the story in any substantial way. Whatever anybody says, comparisons to Catbus from Hayao Miyazaki's animated film  My Neighbor Totoro happened only after I had finished the drawing and began showing it to savvier anime consumers. I can't help but wonder whether Catbus, in Japanese, is also a bad pun that gets funnier beside the word for Pop Tarts.  I wish that Miyazaki could design my breakfast...

I began a draft of this project years ago when I was living in central Denver, a region that naturally keeps its finger on the pulse of Buffalo hipsterdom. This was really more of an emo buffalo. My grasp of hipsterdom during the making of this sketch was as tenuous as it is now. Where was I going with that spiked wrist cuff? This never quite blossomed into a finished piece, but Buffalo Exchange fished it from the archives a few months ago and suggested I put a bow on it. I was overjoyed, but my zeal was soon tempered by the realization that hipsterdom of all kinds might have been redefined during the period between drafts. I decided to crowd-source my research on Facebook.  Some comments have been censored due to requests for buffalo nudity. From this thread, I gleaned that a fixed-gear bike would be an unavoidable accessory. Try though I might, I knew I wasn't going to find a photo of a buffalo riding a fixed-gear bike on any Flickr album to serve as a model...