Another one of our collaborations…gone wrong at my hands. Here are is the drawing that I picked up from Sam.
See the awesome watercolor washes? Gonna be gone in a minute.
5
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BOOM!
So that’s the end of that one. I also incorporated this piece into next week’s strip. Consider it a preview.
I don’t remember if I mentioned it before, but Sam and I trade paintings. He’ll start one, or I will, then we’ll pass it to the other to finish. I even finished up a painting that I incorporated into one of our future “Chickens” strips. Speaking of which, remember, NEW COMIC MONDAY MORNING!
Until then, here is a painting I started, that Sam is currently finishing up. This is the basic timeline below, I am missing a couple of “progress shots” in the middle, but you get the idea. I had no intention of showing any of this, but Sam insisted.
This is not really the start of this piece, I had already started something in watercolor and ballpoint under this. What we have here is the first pass with oil paint. This wasn’t a piece meant for Sam, but somehow it became his.
Freestylin’.
A few versions later. It did not occur to me to photograph those other inbetween stages. It’s not typical for me to document my work. By this point, gouache, acrylic, markers, colored pencils and inks were all added over the initial oil layers. A big “No, no,” in the art world. It causes paintings to become highly unstable and explosive over time.
I showed this version to Rick Berry. He hated it.
Where it was right before I passed it to Sam. Maybe we’ll make Fridays “WIP Day” or something…
Since the website went live this past Friday, no comic today. Gotta give people a little bit more of a chance to check out Sam’s intro to this project, but starting next week, EVERY MONDAY WILL HAVE A NEW PAGE! This is guaranteed.
Now, with that out of the way. Here is a little peek into the making of this project. Sam has a love affair with brown paper sketchbooks. God knows how many of them are littered around his studio. Me, I like them on the side, more like a mistress. Point is, we decided to produce this strip using those books. One for me, one for Sam. Of course we had to decorate the covers. Make it seem more like a real book, not so much a cheap sketchbook fr the art store.
Sam’s cover.
My cover.
This is all Jon’s fault. He not only got me re-pinspired about posting again… but I’d been wanting to do something with him for years, since we met many years ago at a gallery in sacramento. We talked about collaborating on some paintings, or a comic.. but this is what it finally became – -an online web-comic-story. The rules are simple. One writes and draws a handful of pages… the other picks up and takes it where the other left off, going where ever the want. I know it sounds chaotic, and may lead to a dead end, but… for both of us.. it’s hopefully an exorcize in experimentation and creative rejuvenation. Of just foolish fun. And juxtaposition.
The point is the obvious difference in our styles, and how we do, or don’t.. mesh as artists and storytellers. We won’t always, but it’s interesting trying. Actually i’m surprised how well it is flowing together so far. We’re a few pages ahead, so it’s still unfolding for us. Will we peter out? Lose steam? Get bored and quit? Or will we manage to tie all the lose threads into something… say… more organized than the last 20 issues of the Maxx?
Surely even *we* can make more sense than that!
Either way – it’ll be fun trying! And I can’t think of anyone more able to kick my butt into challenging me to do better art, than Jon.
Here it is. I’m very excited to present to you all my new webcomic collaboration with Sam Kieth! Both Sam and myself have been talking about collaborating on a project for a couple of years now. We have traded a few paintings, and we’ve been working on those, (I’ve even finished one piece that I’ve incorporated to one of our future “Chickens” strips).
The comic was born out of a casual phone conversation one afternoon. We were probably both raging about how art is stupid and everybody sucks…typical artist talk, and for some reason, I don’t remember why, I half-assed threw out the idea of a webcomic. You see, I’ve been wanting to do a comic with Sam for quite a while. I probably thought this would be a good way to get that started. I took the idea from an art teacher I had when I was a teenager, Bill Koeb. As a way of introducing everybody to each other, he started at one end of the room with a sheet of paper, asked the first person to draw one panel, then pass it to the next person, and they would draw their panel based on the one before, then he/she would pass it down, and so on.
So I put that on the table, thinking that since we’re both always tied up with something, we can do a strip just like that. In Sam’s free time, he freestyles a page, then I take what he does, then I would freestyle something that continues the story. I’m a fan of spontaneous storytelling. I used to love some of Moebius’ straight pen to paper comics, so I thought why the hell not!
So here it is. We’re rocking shit out. It might be total nonsense, it might not be. It’s an experiment, and we don’t owe you shit!