Thursday, March 09, 2006

Thursday's Inanity: A Risque Cover for a Nuts and Bolts How To Draw Manual, and the Birth of a Speck

If anyone's been looking for the 21st century version of How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way, I've got the book you've been looking for. Here it is: How to Draw: The Best of Wizard Basic Training. Back when I was a major comics geek (I've since been demoted to minor comics geek), I used to love the "How to Draw" sections in each month's Wizard magazine where they'd offer cool drawing tips to would-be comic artists. As with most how-to books, the results of the amateur are often shockingly unlike the work of the pro, but while you're reading and before you've set pencil to paper to produce the predictably depressing result, you're thinking, "Yeah, I can do this!" If people knew they couldn't do beforehand, how-to books would never be profitable. Anyway, they cover everything in this one. From the precise pencils, inks, and paper the pros use, to a quick clinic on perspective, great tips for inking, coloring, composition, everything. So if you're a'hankering for some draw'rin books, I'd suggest you take a gander at this one. If you click on the link, you can, as the image says, search inside of the book to see sample pages.

In Crane news, today was laid back but kinda fun. Went to Best Buy today so David Speck could return Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. He bought it the other night and we tried to watch it but the transfer was so bad, it was almost hard in places to concentrate on the movie. It's been a long time since I've seen anything on DVD look that bad. Anyone else had an issue with the movie? Ran around to a couple of other places, than headed home and played Punisher and Halo multiplayer for hours. It's good times. And because it is Speck's 27th birthday today, we had some chicken enchilada ring and some ice cream cake. He heads out to do his shoot tomorrow. Anyway, back to Halo. More tomorrow.

5 comments:

blankfist said...

27 years old?! What?! Man, I was like forty-two when you were born.

Anonymous said...

Happy Birthday Speck.

(Nathan hates you)

Anonymous said...

Cool, thanks.

(Nathan STILL hates you)

Clay McClane said...

Yeah, happy birthday, Speck!

Bri, your post reminds me: last weekend the wife and I went to Hecht's to buy sheets and comforters. After that, we watched the rest of the 5th season of Sopranos. We watched all 5 seasons in one month!

And the truth is I was never much more exciting than this.

blankfist said...

HB and I went back and watched all the previous seasons of Sopranos (sans season 1 -- for some reason it just ain't in the stars for us). It's about as perfect as a show can be, and I think Lost has ripped off the story structure just a bit... or this could just be a new trend in television writing, I don't know.

But, every show has a dual theme that supports each other. A theme of betrayal would show Tony B betraying Tony S in the same show that 'A' betrayed Crissy. Or a theme of infidelity would show Meadow being betrayed by a lover at the same time Edie Falco's character was contemplating a sexual rendezvous with the house painter... and so on and so forth.

I see loss using this same dual theme approach, but they're on the nose with it whereas The Sopranos are very discreet. Anyhow, that's my two cents.