My favourite artist.

I had to re-draw a panel today, twice, first I thought of a slightly better way of doing it, and it was quite an easy change to make. Then coming back from lunch I realised it would be much better if she wasn’t reacting to the sound of the kettle… she should be too engrossed to notice it at all. So I re-drew the whole panel. It feels good when you realise something like that before it’s too late. I’m sure there’ll be plenty of things I’ll want to change once the book is finished and in the shops, so it’s nice to know I at least caught one before it got away.

So this is my ‘deleted scene’ of the day.

Brandon Graham of King City fame started a new Moebius Meme in the same vein as Paul Pope’s ‘Apple Pie’ one. They’re all collected here. The Starwatcher picture is on the cover of my well worn copy of ‘The Art of Moebius’, I love that picture so much so I couldn’t resist having a stab at my own version featuring Nao.

Haven’t posted anything for a long time – sorry. Been really busy, still drawing Nao (only 60 pages left to draw!… But then I have to paint them all… 183 of them…)

Anyway, this post is about ‘Nelson’, which you can also read about here… A brilliantly conceived project by Rob Davis who is jointly editing it with Woodrow Phoenix, both of whom are very much contributing brilliant work to the book as well. There’s some great people involved and the contributors list reads like a who’s who of British comics. After originally saying yes, I then had to pull out because of my workload on Nao… Luckily Rob came back to me with an idea and we managed to sort something out. I’m very pleased and proud to be involved in such an excellent project and can’t wait to have a hard copy in my hands, hopefully some time around November… I’ve purposely kept myself from looking at the artwork that came after my year, so that it’ll be a surprise when I read it… but what I have seen looks amazing.

A few people have already asked me if I had a Grifter, I didn’t (although I desperately wanted one), I had a Strika for ages, then I think a second hand racer with cowhorn handle bars (I wanted one of these but we couldn’t afford it). Before finally graduating to the new found fad of BMXing.

In other news, I’ve got a top secret meeting tomorrow about something I’m very excited about. Wish me luck.

Been too busy drawing to post blogs… But here’s a little peep at part of panel two, page sixty nine.

In the last week I’ve had to explain to a few people (who’ve been interested) about my meditation practice. Having had to explain off the top of my head, I thought it might be interesting to write it down here and see how it comes out. Apologies in advance to those who come here for drawings, storyboards and stuff about drawing (but hopefully this rough panel sketch of Nao is enough… for now).

Anyway, I’ve managed to get into a routine where I ’sit’ (meditate) twice a day for 16 minutes, once in the morning after I’m washed and dressed and the boy is at school and the baby is having his nap… and once at night, just before the final bedtime ablutions. It’s been a long long time that I’ve been interested in meditation but it’s also taken a long long time to establish any kind of daily ‘practice’ (routine). I would do it sporadically both at home and at a Buddhist Centre, but never regularly until relatively recently. And the trick to getting into it, was doing just a small chunk at a time. I downloaded a neat little ‘app’ for my iphone called ‘Zen Timer’ and started out just doing 10 min sessions, then after a few days I moved the timer to 13 minutes and after a period of doing that, now I’m up to 16. I think with two kids and a shitload of work to do I’m not gonna get above 25-30 minutes for each session per day… at the moment 16 minutes is just right, completely manageable and feeling like it’s beneficial.

“But what do you actually do when you’re meditating? Do you chant? Is it religious? Spiritual?” …No, no and no to the last three questions. Not for me anyway… not right now. To be honest, I don’t know what it is, but I try to see it in the same way as brushing my teeth ie something I don’t really think about, but have to do twice a day.  But with regards the first question, what do I actually do? Well, I sit in ‘Seiza’ position but on two ‘Zafus‘ so I kinda look like this guy (that’s not me). When I was first taught to meditate I was taught ‘Mindfulness of breathing’, which is pretty simple, you just breathe normally, no funny big ‘yoga’ breaths… and you count after each outward breath, you do this up to ten, then start over. Obviously the mind wanders, sometimes almost immediately. That doesn’t matter. If it happens (which it will), you just bring yourself gently back to the counting. It’s important not to give yourself a hard time about your mind wandering, it’s just doing what it does. Some people believe the idea of meditating is to empty your mind, so therefore get all in a tizzy when they can’t stop thinking about stuff for 2 minutes, let alone half an hour. I believe that the mind will calm it’s self, you can’t force it to calm down. If you fill a bath with water, you can’t force the ripples to be still… but they will calm down and stop eventually, if you just watch them. Anyway, that’s Mindfulness of Breathing, I was also taught the Metta Bhavna which I don’t want to go into here because I don’t do it in my daily practice, but they do it a lot at the centre I go to when I can.

Then there’s Zazen which I became really interested in, and it appeals most to my sensibility. More of the Soto sect’s method rather than the Rinzai way with all that koan stuff. Anyway Zazen is basically just ’sitting’ and letting whatever thoughts come… you let them come and go without getting involved… and again the idea is that the mind will calm itself if you’re just sitting there watching it, (not being aggravated by it).

So in my daily practice I do mostly Zazen but if my mind is too hectic I might do a little bit of counting as well, just to get a bit of focus.

I like to see my ‘mind’ as this funny little yapping, excitable dog that won’t seem to shut up, but I’m very fond of this dog, I would never shout out it or lift a finger to hurt it… I just like to watch it. It yaps, yaps yaps away, I’m not really listening to it, just watching… and gradually it calms down, walks round in circles for a bit, then climbs on my lap and goes to sleep. I don’t literally imagine that as I’m meditating, I’m just trying to find  a way of explaining how it feels. But having said that, the image of that dog does flash up sometimes and reminds me to go easy on myself if I’m feeling too hectic. And by no means does the dog sit on my lap and fall asleep every time I meditate… more often than not he yaps all the way through. But occasionally things do calm down and become completely still and that’s a lovely feeling.

There’s plenty of scientific evidence these days proving the medical benefits of meditation, one quick Google search produced this and  this. None of which surprises me. I just think people (myself included) find it hard to find the time to sit around consciously doing ‘nothing’. These days we all feel the need to be doing something, or consuming something, TV , music, food, films… and if we’re not doing that we should be working… or exercising. It’s taken me such a long time to get to a point where I’m doing this everyday, but that was because I really thought it should be done for 30-45 minutes, and who’s got that much spare time on their hands!? And hey, sometimes it’s really boring… and difficult, to just sit there with yourself (and that stupid dog).

But I honestly feel better on the whole for doing it and can’t recommend it enough. Just try 10 mins once a day, see what you think.

And sorry for not posting more often, I’ve got so much work to do, I find it hard to justify stopping to write a post. So this might be all for quite a while again. Even on Twitter I’m not ‘tweeting’ so much, but please feel free to ‘follow’ me cos I do more there than I do here.

When I last drew comics, it was in a time before Photo Shop (at least, a time before I had Photoshop). Coming back after all these years, I’ve found the technical breakthroughs make quite a difference to me. These days I’m more than happy to abandon half a page here, large panels there… and not necessarily because the drawing’s bad, it can be like this one (above), which just didn’t feel right. I like the drawing… but it wasn’t the right one.

I’m sure, of course, that I could’ve done this before Photo Shop, plenty of artists would throw whole pages away, I’ve heard eye witness accounts of Mike McMahon throwing away beautiful finished pages because he wasn’t happy with them. And I know some artists would cut out and paste in new panels if necessary. But I don’t think I ever did that (although I’m sure I really should have).

But with Photo Shop a psychological barrier has been broken. The fact that I can draw separate segments if necessary and paste them together digitally… and the finished thing looks nice on the screen. Has left me feeling a new sense of gay abandon with regards each page… If it’s not right, I just re-draw it on a fresh piece of paper, getting bogged down, rubbing something out over and over, just gets depressing and rarely ends happily.

Of course it means that there isn’t always that ‘original artwork’ which is nice to have and re-sell. But if you’re too worried about that you’re not really paying attention to what the artwork is actually for. The book is the most important thing really and everything else should come second to that.

]]> http://www.naobrown.com/news/2010/12/12/gay-abandon/feed/ 2 http://www.naobrown.com/news/2010/11/10/the-big-bosom/ http://www.naobrown.com/news/2010/11/10/the-big-bosom/#comments Tue, 09 Nov 2010 23:25:06 +0000 admin http://www.naobrown.com/news/?p=1274

Having to move some stuff from one studio to another last week, I unearthed some VHS tapes and one of them was my old showreel from my short time as a director with RSA films. I got my Dad to transfer it on to a DVD for me (because I wouldn’t know where to begin). And I wasn’t too disappointed by what I found. I’d seen the Stina Nordenstam video not too long ago because I posted it up here a while back, but the other stuff I hadn’t seen in AGES.

There’s a short film/music video thing I did called ‘Learning How to Walk’, which was all shot by me on Super 8 and edited by the excellent Seb Monk. It was basically pieced together from a trip to New York in 1999 0r 2000, which coincided with The Yankees winning the World Series, hence the ticker tape parade.

Then there’s two versions of a title sequence I did for a BBC show called ‘The Fear’ which was a fifteen minute, Jackanory style format, with actors reading a story straight to camera. I remember Sean Pertwee did one and I think Sadie Frost did one too but I don’t remember any more and it’s internet presence is nonexistent. Seb edited one of them, but the one that ends with the zoom into the girl’s hand was edited by the wonderful Sophie Muller. I don’t remember why we did two versions with two different editors, but there y’go.

I thought finding this reel coincided nicely with my trip to the Thought Bubble Festival in Leeds this year. I’m going to be on the ‘From Panel to Film’ panel on Saturday (see post below for more details). I was a bit unsure at first, about being on the panel, especially because I haven’t had a film made from a comic or anything major like that… but I suppose I can say I’ve spent the last 17 years doing storyboards, mostly in the advertising world but a few films as well.

I left the comic world behind in about 1993-4 and held great ambitions to be a director and direct my own films. I thought storyboarding might be the perfect route into that exciting, exotic world… But this show reel and a first draft of my screenplay, called ‘Instructions How to Die’ was about as far as I got really. Oh, and this…

Then my interest in comics as a storytelling means was reawakened… specifically after seeing the film adaptation of Hellboy,  which, as adaptations go, wasn’t too bad… But when I saw it, I couldn’t help thinking how much I preferred the books… I mean really it’s no competition, gimme Mike Mignola’s beautiful artwork over Guillermo del Toro’s film any day of the week. Basically, with that little epiphany, I fell back in love with the idea of drawing comics (I’d never stopped being a fan of reading them) …but the possibilities of what one person can do, sitting alone at their desk, in their spare time, or full time if they’re lucky enough to get paid… that possibility excited me again… and the siren call of film no longer turned my head… she wasn’t ‘all that’ anyway .

So I’m glad to be back nestling in the big bosom of comics. And I feel very lucky that she even considered taking me back… Mind you I haven’t got my feet under the table just yet.

Today I booked a hotel and secured a pro pass for the Thought Bubble festival in Leeds. I’ll be taking along some photocopies of the work I’ve been doing, they’ll probably be all crumpled up in my pocket. If you can find me, please feel free to ask for a sneaky peak, I’ll be more than happy to oblige, as long as you keep mum. The picture above is the banner from the guests page of the festival website… There’s some great talent going, I feel very honoured to be included and I’m really looking forward to it.

*UPDATE* News just in, it seems now I will be taking part in the ‘From Panel to Film’ Panel on Saturday the 20th at the Royal Armouries Hall between 11:30-12:30, hosted by John Mosby. I’ll be up there with Andy Diggle, Richard Starkings and my buddy Adam Brockbank.