Category Archives: Books

Books: How To Think When You Draw (and Write)

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Kickstarters I Have Known and Loved #2

After 2018 I started following things on Kickstarter and Patreon. After pledging to a Kickstarter project to create a clock-radio using actual nixie tubes for display, I started to look at descriptions of other projects.

One such project was a series of cookbooks of art and writing tutorials by the Etherington Brothers out of England. Lorenzo Etherington handles the drawing; Robin Etherington handles the writing.

Lorenzo has a very intriguing, very traditional style of drawing. It’s very 1940’s dieselpunk, all big internal-combustion engines strapped to race cars. It reminds me of the old CARtoons magazine I used to read when I was a kid, or the original Mad Magazine, or even some of Will Eisner’s work (for examples, see Eisner’s Comics and Sequential Art).

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Books: How to Draw Black People (updated)

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Kickstarters I Have Known and Loved #3

It is very good to be able to look out into the world and see yourself reflected back.

As a writer and cartoonist, I want to be able to portray and ultimately connect with all sorts of people. I have been noticing that all my people drawings tend to look like Generic White People, just as my trees tend to look like Generic Maple Trees. I have to remember to explicitly make things look different, to match the variety of people (and trees) I actually see on the street. But how to do that?

A week or so ago, I stumbled across a very interesting Kickstarter. 

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Books: Malaak

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Kickstarters I Have Known and Loved #1

This was my first Kickstarter support.

Malaak is a series of comic books by French-Lebanese artist Joumana Medlej. It describes a Lebanon invaded by demonic spirits of war, and what the ancient guardians of the land must do to defend it.

In 2011 I was looking for drawing tutorials, and I stumbled across this incredibly-detailed chart of how to draw cats. Every type and variation of cat appearance was laid out in almost mathematical precision. Who could have done this?

I followed a link and discovered Cedarseed and Joumana Medlej. And a world of new colours and ideas.

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