Bizarro's 10,000th Anniversary Show" with Dan Piraro After 25 years at the drafting table, acclaimed cartoonist Dan Piraro, creator of Bizarro, has just drawn his 10,000th cartoon and is going on tour.

LOCATION: The Dark Room Theater 
 WHEN: April 26 Thursday 7:00pm & 9PM
DETAILS:
 http://darkroomsf.com/#bizarro FB: http://www.facebook.com/events/181362625314848/

Bizarro appears daily in several hundred newspapers across North American and internationally, and has won an unprecedented three consecutive "Best Cartoon Panel of the Year" awards from the National Cartoonists Society. For the  years 2002 through 2008, Piraro was nominated for its highest award, "Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year," and received it for the year 2009.

Our good friend Michael Capozzola is on the bill too, as well as producing the tour, handling PR- and spamming everyone he knows.
 
It's bound to be a great show!
Add Comment
 
 
The idea for Octobers "Comic Makeover" inkDrinkDraw seemed like a simple one, but some file errors nearly got the better of us. Fortunatly we had several stories so it worked out fine in the end.

So here's how a Comic Makeover works:

Step One:
Find an old comic book (look online too) with a short story with 2 to 4 characters (two main characters and X number of side characters works great) that's about 3 or 4 pages long. The tackier the story the better, Romance Stories work great for this.
Step Two:
Next convert all the art EXCEPT the boarders, word balloons and text to blue line art (see example below).
Step Three:
Once you have your Blueline sheets, print a bunch of those out keeping the blue fairly light (lighter than this sample), Two or three artist can work on a single story or if there is time everyone can do a full story on their own.

Now comes the fun part ...
Step Four:
Don't tell anyone what the story is or what it's about!
Just tell them they need to design some characters (character's theme can be anything, cats, robots, monsters, whatever) as long as they are simple enough to do a four page story in the time you have.  If you have lots of artist, one person can design the characters, one can do the pencils and one can do the final inking so it's a fun colaboration.
Step Five:
Now that they have characters it's time to give them the story sheets and let them workout how thier characters are going to play out within the layouts of the blueline sheets (backgrounds can be altered to fit in with characters better if you want).

The Finished Project:
Below is and example of how Brian, Jeff and I came up with some characters for the story above and then shared pencil and inking duties, Enjoy!

(Clicking images will enlarge them for easier reading)
1 Comment
 
 
Picture
Click to Enlarge
Some of you maybe fimilar with with the Vinyl Toy Culture, or even making Paper Toys. 
It's an idea Brian and I have kicked around for a while as we both enjoy a good toy and thought this would be a ton of fun.

So, September's inkDrinkDraw was at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco where a group of us got together with markers, tape, glue and paper and made some really fun Custom Paper Toy Monsters. 

Boy this was a fun project to do as a group!  I'd recommend this to any art group that wants something fun to do. 

Brian had put together several blank Template Toys for us to choose from and shortly after X-acto knives and markers were flying.  With a group of twenty or so artist going wild it wasn't long before we had a slew of assorted Paper monsters on display!

For more info and photos of this party, visit Brian's  Atomic Bear Press Here >
Or, you can still see the Paper Monsters at the Cartoon Art Museum Book Store, just ask Heather!

Hope to see everyone at our next inkDrinkDraw party!
1 Comment
 
 
InkDrinkDraw at Church St Cafe
I had to take the picture so I'm not in it, duh.
So last night's InkDrinkDraw at Church St Cafe (260 Church St - between 15th St & Market St) went really well.  A lot of our regular group where out of town, but a few people we hadn't seen in a while came and it was a nice mellow evening of conversation and drawing challenges.

The night's theme was "Working with Faces' and we came up with some interesting ways to challenge each other to draw faces in ways we might not draw them otherwise.

We each drew a sheet of some fairly random shapes and handed them off to the next person to start making a faces from one of the shapes, the sheets kept getting passed around till all the shapes had become faces.  We ended up with some pretty interesting characters!

Next we each selected a character that we didn't draw and then created 25 "Expressions" of the character based on some "Experssions" sheets we had.   It'll all sounds simple, but if you try it'll you'll learn a ton about characterization.

Here's a complete example of a shape drawn by one person made into a character by Jeff Plotkin and the Brian Kolm drew the character in his style in 25 expressions > VIEW HERE. 

I'll post a few more images from the evening as I get them and have time.
 
Add Comment
 
 
While we only had a small group for the very FIRST inkDrinkDraw gathering  everyone had a good time.   The meet was at HOOTERS SF near pier 39 so there was food drinks and the Hooters girls made for built-in models.
We started off with George (Webber) doing a live Demo on using Copic Markers and talked about the advantages of Copics over many other brands of Markers.

After that we did an assortment of Hooters related Open Projects, Brian work on quick Gesture sketchs of the fast moving Hooters girls, George was doing cartoon characters of the girls and Mike & Jeff did an assortment of cartoons and sketches.

All in all a pretty good night andthe Hooters girls made out like bandits.
Picture
Tracy & gWebber - Hooters SF
Picture
Brittany & gWebber - Hooters SF
Add Comment