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Eric: I once paid for a man's tanning salon time, just to watch him fry.
(From Chemical Comics Daily. Click on the thumbnail for... well, the index page. Then click on the entry for February 28 for full sized men with no names!)
What yanked my eyes on this entry is the use of light and dark. This is some serious hardcore penwork, which I'm always a big fan of. The humor's of a basic dissonance type and that's just fine, but the detailed hatching is just fantastic. I can't imagine he'll be able to do one of these a day -- he'll need to cut corners somewhere just to ensure he also has time to eat and sleep. But that's a nice way to open.
Looking at today's entry reveals another huge attention to shading details via hatching. So I think it's officially his style. We'll see how long he can keep it up before his wrist snaps off his hand.
Posted by Eric Burns-White at March 1, 2005 12:19 PM
Comments
Comment from: Hoot posted at March 1, 2005 12:40 PM
This is one of just a few that were added to my Trawl from the Ironman competition. Usually I find attempts to use a lot of penwork like this creates a messy strip. So far both examples have been pretty clean looking. I'm looking forward to more.
Comment from: Bob Stevenson posted at March 1, 2005 1:02 PM
Was the first one copied from somewhere anyone recognizes? The change in style from day one to two is really pretty drastic, despite both involving pen-work. I only bring it up because the light, dark and composition in the first is indeed absolutely spectacular. The second strip falls very, very flat in those very same categories.
Comment from: Chris Bishop posted at March 1, 2005 1:30 PM
I was totally impressed until i saw the album cover he says inspired it and then i was much less impressed...
Comment from: tynic posted at March 1, 2005 9:14 PM
Moreover, hatching isn't necessarily as time-consuming as it might seem. I once estimated my speed for seriously detailed, designed-for-publication hatching at about two minutes per square inch. For a looser style like this one, you could go a lot quicker.
Comment from: Brendan posted at March 1, 2005 9:52 PM
The first panel is a fairly recogizeable image to Western fans. It's the most familiar cover image of "Once Upon a Time in the West," made by Leone about a year after his more famous "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly." The movie is a series of homages to earlier Westerns, similar to a more genre-specific version of Tarantino's "Kill Bill." The image is an artist's rendition of a one-on-three shootout about ten minutes in: three minor characters cock their rifles as the hero fires his pistol in the distance. It's almost exact, except the hero has been removed, the background has been changed, and the image has been reversed.
Comment from: J. Stoncius posted at March 2, 2005 12:18 AM
It's true that hatching generally doesn't take as long as one might think (especially done at the size webcomics are usually drawn), unless you really bother to set things up so that your angles all match up. I'm not a big fan of random hatching, and I only use it myself when going after a very specific sort of atmosphere (it works in the cowboy drawing, but not really in the other comic). I'm not sure the positives of using such a technique exclusively outweigh the negatives...but that's just me.
Comment from: Eric Burns posted at March 2, 2005 2:33 PM
And, of course, the image's shading was hatched. Which still impresses me. But then, I'm easily impressed.
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