2008 | Page 2 | Craig Thompson

paintallica

August 28, 2008 craig Friends

I’m a bit anxious about what I’ve gotten myself into…
…agreeing to participate in a chaotic painting/performance/installation/collaboration called PAINTALLICA.
The namesake should cancel out all the artsy-fartsy pretensions. My understanding is that there will be
a couple sleepless nights of a group of us ransacking a PICA-ordained gallery space. And the project is
headed up by my recently-mentioned Wisco’ art buddy Dan Attoe. It’s all part of the famous
Time Based Arts Festival in Portland. Here’s some details. And at the Portland Mercury.
For comics fans, Jeremy Tinder will also be joining in on the action. Also there will likely be much shirtlessness.

summer’s gonna turn into fall

August 24, 2008 craig Habibi

Summers are always a bit chaotic, but I apologize for neglecting blog posting.
Here’s four steps towards a recent page of HABIBI. 1) rough pencils 2) refined pencils 3) half-inked 4) finished.

And below is recent documentation of my rural adventures visiting my sister in Nebraska — paired with an old doodle from my
sketchbooks, referenced from a National Geographic photograph perhaps? (let me know if you recognize it.)

Please note that I don’t wear a helmet while drawing or in everyday life.

you still have some time

August 4, 2008 craig Friends

My longtime Wisconsin buddy & famous painter Dan Attoe and I are doing a talk at the Portland Art Museum
~ This Thursday, August 7, 6pm, 1219 SW Park. The museum is exhibiting some of Dan’s paintings and neon as part of
their Contemporary Northwest Art Awards show. They’re really sumptin’ to behold — Epic naturalistic landscapes
speckled with smaller vignettes and revelatory text. Dan might be hesitant to admit it, but they’ve much in
common with the beloved medium of comics. Difficult to capture in crappy photos and jpegs, but here’s a glimpse.

Anyways, Dan and I will be doodling live on stage and sharing scandalous stories of our shared upbringing as troubled rural youth.
I’ve got some embarrassing doozies to tell about Dan and you can be certain he’ll retaliate with shameful accounts of this
scrawny country lad awkwardly growing up in the agricultural heartland of Wisconsin. Here’s a link to a community college scholarship
trip we took in 1995. And here’s a photo of us from last September.

What am I showing him in my hand? Come to the talk and find out!

no c. con

July 22, 2008 craig Misc

Jacquelyn and a few others were curious if I was attending the big ol’ Comic-Con jamboree in San Diego in these upcoming days.
The answer is “nope”, but I will when HABIBI is finished (couple more years). And in the meantime, the organizers of the
Stumptown Comics Festival wanted me to note that they’ll be selling the t-shirt that adapts the poster design by Mike King
and myself, available at Shannon Wheeler’s booth (#2200). More later…

quick scribble

July 17, 2008 craig Friends, Habibi, Sketchbook

I took a couple of days off when my buddy Alessandro visited from Italy. Here’s a doodle from a front porch conversation:

And here’s a little jumble of chapter five progress. It’s coming along!

Thanks, as usual, for the blog comments. And on that last round, lots of useful self-preservation tips.
For those in Portland, I’ll be at my friend Danny’s LACKTHEREOF cd release party at Holocene tonight.

unquenchable

July 1, 2008 craig Misc

shoveling away

June 21, 2008 craig Habibi

All my favorite pages of HABIBI are too spoiler-ish to share,
so instead here’s a fairly innocuous/boring page that can be broken down into various stages of development.
It’s outright shameful the lapse of time from the first draft free-form journaled in my sketchbook in October 2004 and the final inks
laid down a couple of days ago. But here you go — 1) sketchbook rough in ballpoint pen… 2) composed into pages in the thumbnail draft…

… 3) the earliest stage of penciling … 4) note how I flipped the first two panels to flow better …

5) final inks. This is page 298. And today I finished page 302. Thank you for waiting!

PS — for those of you interested in production details, check my old tool talk posting.

comics vs sketchbook

June 11, 2008 craig Habibi, Sketchbook

Quick follow-up to that last entry. Peter asked how big the sketchbook pages are. They’re 9″ x 12″.
Here’s another sketch with today’s page of HABIBI laid behind it. The HABIBI pages are drawn within
an 8.75″ x 12.5″ live area, but you can see how detailed they are compared to the sketchbook.

Because the sketches are drawn from life with plenty of space on the page, it’s easy to dash them off with pocketbrush.
But the comics compositions are ridiculously worked over – generating heaps of eraser shavings. And they’re inked with
these sable watercolor brushes (I’ve graduated to the Winsor Newton series seven!)
(That’s my hand posing to give a sense of the page size.)

Anyways, this HABIBI page was drawn today. And the sketch above is of my friend Kathleen at BenoÃ®t Peeter’s apartment in Paris.

papier Ã dessin

June 2, 2008 craig Sketchbook

There’s dozens and dozens of figure drawing sketchbooks on my shelves, so I’d thought I’d occasionally post a drawing. Almost all of them are executed with those Pentel pocketbrush pens straight to paper with no pencils or erasers or fussing like my comics pages. And the subjects are admittedly almost always pretty girls/women. Occasionally I also draw trees. Here’s a couple drawings – one of Gabrielle and one of Miriam.

abandoned elliots

May 25, 2008 craig Friends

My advice to young cartoonists is that the biggest and most important challenge
is simply seeing a project to completion. I’d draw ten pages of a story, get bored
or distracted, then dump ’em in the drainage ditch, leaving a wake of unfinished
books — until finally sticking with CHUNKY RICE. Below is one of my little
rejected children – Elliot Chicken – and two projects left in purgatory.

The first is from a pitch I proposed to Dark Horse Comics in Fall 1998. Not long after ending my graphic designer employment there (but long enough to recover from tendonitis), I rounded together a book proposal which included character sheets like this one for Elliot, sample comics pages, and a plot synopsis. The project was turned down by the higher-ups, but if it hadn’t, it would have been my firstborn book, claiming eldest rights over Chunky.

This second preview is a few panels from a jam comic my dear cartoonist buddy and Wisconsinite Aaron Renier had begun. It’s drawn “CONVERSATIONS”-style where we’d render half a panel and email it to the other to complete. I revived lil’ troubled Elliot, and Aaron created this bizarre lunk named Waterbear, and we intended to make-it-up-as-we-went-along until we had a 200 page graphic novel!!!
About three pages in, we lost steam.
It was probably the pressure of our bigger projects (HABIBI for me, WALKER BEAN ~coming soonish from First Second~ for him) or a blend of laziness and insecurity. It would have been a lot more fun to draw if we still lived in the same town. These sloppy colors were just slathered on to brighten the blog — Below is an untarnished black&white panel.

wb&ec.jpg

In other news, I love reading your comments. Yoplem asked about the ROBOX story. It appeared in a Dark Horse anthology called REVEAL with “Lone Wolf 2000” on the cover and published in November 2002. Hope your weekend’s been good, everybody!

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