Jed said...
On the subject of bargains:
(a bunch of delusional crackhead rambling, and then...)
Which is why I no longer give a shit about making beautiful unmarred originals when it comes to my commercial work. Their Magic Specialness doesn't even rate a quarter of what somebody paid to publish it once. That just seems sad to me. It's great that these pages will undoubtedly find their way into the hands of those who will appreciate them, but where is the magic specialness Mark? You know, the magic specialness that rates more than minimum wage for the time and effort it takes to make one of these things?
You lost me again, Jed. What true artist works for money? Unless you're outrageously successful like Thomas Kincaide, you're constantly juggling the fun of creating versus the duty of feeding and housing yourself and your loved ones.
The magic specialness is in the creating and the sharing.
Anonymous said...
I like art pages which look like they've been made from scratch. The pencils, the white outs, the overlays, the lettering (remember when you read the DIALOGUES on the actual art pages)
BonzoGal said...
I agree, Anonymush! All that stuff lets you know that somebody sweated over the art. I have a couple of Mark's originals and they're swell!
SRBissette said...
But are they sweaty?
I work on a salad bar, so the sneeze screen also deflects any sweat droplets that fall from my furrowed brow. I also wear animator's gloves and a full-body condom, after showering with pure Clorox bleach.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with Voice of Reason recently. He sent a link to a news article declaring that "Scientists reveal the smell of male sweat is an aphrodisiac to women!!!" (paraphrasing) and I wrote back "How many times are they going to "REVEAL" that? They revealed that YEARS ago!" After a little more debate on whether or not this was "news", Mrs. VoR piped in and said that she, too, remembered hearing this years ago.
At this juncture, VoR and JR asked where I heard this, and I had the pleasure of saying "Why, on the Rush Limbaugh Show, of course!" thus totally smashing their long-held belief that there was nothing of any value or credibility to be learned from that show.
And it's all true. That's where I heard it. Years ago.
OK, back to "REAL" art vs "DIGITAL" art:
I LIKE BOTH!!!
Here's a screen shot of the new Teeny Weeny I am working on today. At the very bottom you can see a sketch of a panel background. That little scribble is the only "original art" that exists for this entire Teeny Weeny page. Tons of work goes into these things, and after it's all over I got nothing to sell, no tangible evidence of the creating. Where is the magic specialness???
1. In the handsome page rate those wonderful people at Nickelodeon pay me to print these things.
2. In the complete ownership of the character that I may collect into a collected volume someday, or who knows, maybe even turn into the next Hello Kitty.
3. It just looks cool! I love the clean "geometrical" look of TW comics, and it would take me months, if not years, to achieve that look on paper - if I could even achieve it at all. For all this talk about my super-neat originals, I am actually a VERY sloppy, unsteady artist.
How about you, eeTeeD? Have you ever tried that $2500 wacom superboard? I'd love to have it in my arsenal - but I gotta weight that against getting the house painted before it rots and stuff like that. If you have tried one - WHERE did you try it? Any advice on where to go in Massachusetts and test drive such a thing?
7 comments:
Man, you're ALL off base.
I read that "male pheromone" thing back in the SEVENTIES!
It was in Playboy or Penthouse or Hustler or Oui or Gent or Nugget or Good Housekeeping or one of those. BUT I READ IT! Such old hat.
But that's why I KNOW when Jean says "Get away from me, you hobo!" she really means "Get over here you big sexy man!"
no, i never tried such a tablet.
if you want to not only try one, but also OWN one, here is what to do...
do some web searching on the company. find the names of two people in the company who would fit in with this scam. then e-mail one a carefully composed letter implying the other had told you that the company would be sending you a tablet to use as part of a campaign. if they take the bait carefully string them along ‘til they send you one gratis
The "magic specialness" is there when you sit back after slaving for hours on one panel and say "Damn, that looks GOOD!". And it's especially "magic specialness" when you look back months or years later and still say "Damn, that looks GOOD!".
It doesn't matter if you're doing it dragging around bezier curves with a mouse or painting with squid ink (diluted with male sweat, of course!) on bristol board.
Having said this, I do miss having a piece of original art to show for my work sometimes. I've been left out of all the BLAB! museum shows because of this. Moan, whine, sob...
The point of my dellusional crackhead rant, was that commercial art originals actually LOSE value after they see print for no apparent logical reason. Thus my explanation sounded like a dellusional crackhead rant, on purpose, because I can't make any sense out of how this could possibly be.
Hey, who could be in this for the money? I wasn't talking about my own sense of magic specialness--but the subjective and fickle magic specialness of the market place. You know, Fine Art with a capitol A, vs Collectables vs the degraded leavings of commercial artists after they've published something.
So, you know, since I was trying (unsucessfully) to be clever instead of clear, everyone is responding with their own personal feelings of magic specialness as it relates to commercial art, which is beautiful, but not really the point I was trying to make, which was about the market place.
And though few artists make art to get rich, if you're making commercial art, you ARE in it for the money. That doesn't mean that money is your first consideration, but if you are hired to do a job, you should get paid for that job.
Now if your'e doing comics for the love of it, knowing that your audience is small, and you can do pretty much whatever you want, that's not really much of a commercial enterprise. Which is fine, but the result is still something you worked hard to make, just as hard as you might if you were actually getting paid for it.
Now it's this very "for the love of it" argument that makes all your relatives think you want to draw them stuff for free. From this thinking comes all the other exploitative behavior that most people in the business of selling their art are accustomed to, ie doing it for the "exposure", spec work, etc.
So Mark, is art a business, or isn't it a business? And if it isn't, why not do it as a hobby, and sell insurance to pay the mortgage?
So if we can agree that you're engaged in a genuine business, why should the value of your work become degraded after it sees print? I'm not asking why it DOES, I'm asking why it SHOULD. Often it's the same art that someone paid several times the price to publish once.
It's a sweet deal for your fans, and probably no one else is really interested in buying the things, but if I spend the same ammount of time that you spend on a page on a painting that hangs in a gallery, I can get ten times as much. Sort of. after the gallery takes their 40% to 60% cut, but still that comes out to considerably more $$. And I don't believe that this is because a painting is inherantly a better piece of art than a comic book page.
Comic art specifically seems to be undervalued by the folks who buy art. Back in the early days of comic books and comic strips they sometimes used to shred the originals after they saw print. At the same time, a Norman Rockwell original drawing would've probably fetched you a few hundred bucks, which was a whole lot of lettuce back then. So what's the deal? Why haven't we gotten over this idea that original comic book and comic strip art is just shy of garbage?
Anybody here have a paint fetish? A fixation maybe? And I don't mean digital.... I mean roll your nekked self around in glorious color on a canvas. Can't do that with a Wacom, can you? Just wondering....
Wow, Teeny Weeny is even Teenier and Weenier when you post it that way.
Whoa, this comment exchange is getting pret-tee heady and out there. I'm with Jed, but I'm with Mark, too -- you're dead right, Mark. Celebrity has superceded art 1,000,000% -- but then again, it's superceded reality itself. I mean, politics is second to celebrity, even in the once-glorious monarchies (as the film THE QUEEN very concisely and dramatically demonstrated, capturing the very moment of recognition on the part of royalty that celebrity had trumped them all -- for us colonials, it was Reagan's election).
Why are you still using Freehand?
Why aren't you using the "Creative Suite"?
And Bissette is dead on about Ronald Reagan.
Then before you know it, Bill Clinton is playing sax on Arsenio Hall and boffing Barbra Streisand in the Lincoln Bedroom!
They can all blow me.
All of 'em.
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