Having access to Sam through email or phone, I wanted him to see the work I’m doing, and get his opinions and advice. I sent him some pages I’m working on, and at one point during all this, he calls to talk about my art. Of course I’m pestering him and trying to get a monster pin-up from him, all this time, and he says, okay, I’ll draw you a monster. But he’s busy this week making this deadline, and maybe next week. But when the next week comes he’s going to be busy for another month, but he definitely wants to do it. And so the weeks drag on like this. One day he finally says, “I know, I know, I telling you I’ll do it, and then setting the date back. I’ll just have to sit down and do it.” He promises he’ll draw me an Easter Island Monster.
He said it a couple times, this Easter Island business. I realize after finally inquiring, he plans to draw the many-headed Easter Island monster I drew in the second Doris Danger story, which I had sent him a copy of. And I tell him, No, no, draw your own monster. I don’t want you to copy my monsters. And like I tell everyone, I have to explain that I don’t want him to draw in Kirby’s style. I want him to draw in his own style. So he says he’ll come up with something.
Regarding my own work, he says he enjoys it, but that I’ve got to build more confidence in my line work. This is the only advice I remember him giving me about actually drawing. He said when you do enough lines, you can just draw them, swoosh, and they’re nice and smooth. He said, You know what you need to do, is just take a piece of paper, and just go from one end to the other, and just draw lines. Fill the page with lines. Just keep drawing lines, so you’re not so worried about them. If you worry about drawing them while you’re drawing them, they’ll be imperfect, and shaky. You can see the worry in the lines. That’s good advice, but of course it’s always hard to hear when people pick out and nail exactly what your weaknesses are, because it makes you realize, yep, not only do I have weaknesses and I know these are my weaknesses, but people can pick out my weaknesses.
Sam talks a little about how he got into the industry. He really wanted to get into comics, and finally he and his wife worked out that she would work and he would stay home and draw, and they’d have enough money for him to really give it his all for maybe a year or two? And he was able to land work.
He told me his earliest paying gig was doing the inks for Matt Wagner’s Mage. And Matt would send him these pencils that were so simple and sparse. And Sam always wanted to spice them up, and add shading and cross-hatching. But it hit him one day, that everything Matt needed to convey was already in those simple pencils. Sam often wishes he could pair his art down to those essentials. Simplify. Clean. Now it’s a skill he really admires.
In the early days, when he was still learning and honing his craft, he would take a page, and if there was an area of black, he wouldn’t just cover it all over with black ink. Instead, he would practice drawing his lines, practice his control. He would draw lines over the area, then cross-hatch over the first layer of lines, then again and again and again, until the area was completely blacked out. So he was taking a lot of time to fill in the black areas, but he was getting experience and practice, and really learning his control for his lines.
After Sam had called me that night, I really wanted to do some inking exercises and get better. I knew my linework was pretty unsteady and I didn’t have a lot of control, but I tried to go with it, and just make that a part of the artwork. Now, with Sam calling me on it, I realized I’d better do something about it.
I had just bought an inking book from Steve Rude, called “The Art of Comic-Book Inking.” It was by one of his inkers, Gary Martin. To be honest, at that time, I couldn’t have cared less about inking comics. I bought it because it was a Steve Rude book, and I had bought it from the artist.
But now that Sam was giving me inking advice, I pulled it out and read it. Overall I enjoyed the book. BUT…I REALLY enjoyed two things in it. First, it had some GREAT inkers, all inking the same page, so that you could compare how different inkers tackle the same problems, and what they come up with. I’m talking GREAT inkers. Dave Stevens, Brian Bolland, Tom Palmer, Terry Austin, P. Craig Russell, Kevin Nowlan You could see the different inking techniques each one fell into, the styles of cross-hatching or shading. I loved looking at these, and just studying the minute differences. What a comic-nerdy thing to do.
The other thing I thought was great was that it had a couple pages of inking exercises. So when Sam told me to practice lines, I broke out this book and immediately started practicing my inking exercises. And they put me to shame. Doing the exercises really makes you see how bad you are, and how much you need to practice.
But I practiced my exercises every time I picked up a brush. I would take a piece of paper and fill it with lines before I moved on to my work. I did it for maybe a few weeks, and sure enough, I saw leaps and bounds in the improvement of my control. It made me proud, looking at the jump in quality I saw in my art.