Heaven and the Dead City, Volume 1-- The Book

Volume 1 of my graphic novel Heaven and the Dead City is out!

It's my first REAL published book!
(As opposed to all those imaginary books I've had published, that is...)

Look! It even has a spine and everything!

(Um, try to ignore the paint-spattered table it's resting on...)

And you can turn the pages!!!

(Yes, I do have a Lucky Cat pencil holder...)

This volume covers Chapters 1 and 2 of the ongoing webcomic.
You can read them in their entirety here : http://www.co2comics.com/pages/co2_heaven_and_the_dead_city.html ,
as well as Chapter 3, currently in progress (on my drawing table as well.) :  http://www.co2comics.com/pages/co2_heaven_and_the_dead_city_3.html

As I mentioned in an earlier blog  post, this painting
will be the cover of Heaven and the Dead City,
                  Volume 2. (right)

Co2 Comics just recently did some blogposts about their artists and this week was my turn. You can read about it here: http://www.co2comics.com/blog/2012/07/24/the-forecast-calls-for-raine/  (Ahh, puns...)

Heaven and the Dead City is available in
both hardcover and paperback forms here:

http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/co2comics

In the future, I will also be posting early pages

of the story in sequence in The Watcher Tree.

Stay tuned!

Fan Girls and Their Animal Friends...

A few years ago, I did several fan paintings of some of my favorite comics characters. They were done as much for my portfolio as they were for the sheer fun of it. There are actually lots of comic book portraits I'd still love to do (along with an endless amount of other ideas for illustrations) but here are the few I managed to finish.

And please notice the gratuitous use of animals whenever I can fit them into a picture...

Wonder Woman, 2000. Gouache, colored pencils, chalk.
With extra added doves.

This is Wonder Woman in one of her many evolving outfits. I did like that they recently tried to give her breastplate straps (how amazingly practical!) as well as dark leggings, which I also sort of liked as well. However, both the straps and pants seemed have disappeared once more and she's back to bare legs and worrying again about her top staying in place while she thwarts evil-doers.

Actually, I'd love to do portraits of other super-heroines -- Storm, Black Canary, Catwoman, Emma Frost, the Scarlet Witch, etc., etc.  For fun, I'd love to do a picture of the old version of Supergirl when she still had Streaky the Super-Cat and Comet the Superhorse...

 
                   Every little girls' dream pets... and they come with their own capes.

               While we're at it, why not the new Batwoman with Ace the Bat-hound?
                           Everyone remembers Ace the Bat-hound, right?

I just think poor Kate Kane needs a dog. Especially a dog who wears a mask

to conceal his secret identity to fight crime in Gotham City.

(I for one certainly wouldn't recognize him with the mask on...)

Oh, who am I kidding? I'll use any excuse to get an animal in a picture with the humans.

For instance:

                                     
                                             It's Logan with his cuddly wolverine buddies!
                                                  (Wolverine, 2001. Gouache, colored pencils, chalk.)                

Because if you work in comics you're going to eventually have to do a picture

 of Wolverine someday... It's inevitable.

Animal Man, 2001. Gouache, colored pencils.

And of course, if you're going to combine animals with superheroes, here's a no-brainer:
Animal Man. (left)

 I loved the Grant Morrison revision of this character in the early '90's
and I even did a
few sample pages of penciling for my portfolio years ago. (I can drag those out for a future post if you really want to see them...)

But ten years later, I took one of the panels from those early sample pages and for fun, blew it up and turned it into this painting.
.








Actually the first comic characters I ever attempted were for my friend Matt, who is a big Neil Gaiman and Sandman fan. He commissioned me to do several members of the Endless, and although I never finished the whole family for him, I did get to have fun experimenting with the new medium I was working in (gouache.) 

Death, 1998. Gouache. No animals.
But she does have a goldfish (not pictured.)

This is the first painting I did for Matt. He came up with the concepts and drew little sketches for me of his ideas. I used his ideas as the basis for all the following (with the exception of Daniel, which was my concept.)

Delirium, 1999. Gouache.
Here's some goldfish... and some flying frogs...
and oh, my head hurts...

With a definite Salvador Dali and Tori Amos influence.
Even though I've also been told she looks a lot like my sister.

Destiny, 2005. Gouache.
Too stoic for cute animal friends.

Destiny was the roughest one to do because he isn't exactly the jolliest guy in comics. And trying to get the eclipse lighting was frustrating no matter how many astronomy photos I looked at as reference.

Dream, 2000. Gouache.
The raven was a must...

A photo of Matt's friend and her new baby was used
as reference for Lyta and baby Daniel.
Matt (who's an architect) wanted the castle in the background to
 look like it was Gaudi-inspired.

Daniel, 2000.  Gouache.
Now this guy's got some cool pets.

Daniel grew up to become the new Dream King, all in white. Again, I couldn't resist the urge to put animals in the picture, so here we have the three Gate Guardians of the Dream Realm.

Zatanna, 2000. Gouache.

Yes, I posed for this one twelve years ago and nearly
threw out my back in the process...

And here's my version of Zatanna the Magician, with brown hair as opposed to the  black hair she's usually shown with. Apart from looking a little like the young Kate Bush (intentional), she's a bit more cheesecake than I usually do. And that certainly isn't a bad thing. 

(Speaking of magicians, I've always had a soft spot for Dr. Strange and wouldn't mind doing a portrait of him one day.
Oh, I'll find some sort of
weird Steve Ditko-esque creature to keep
him company, don't you worry...)
                                                                                               

Later on, I became a fan of James Robinson's Starman series and started playing around with decorative borders, which I've recently become quite fond of using.

(Example: my previous blog post...)   

Starman Jack, 2002. Gouache, colored pencils.

I was trying to give this one an Art Deco look in keeping with how the city in the comic looked. A former neighbor of mine posed as Jack by sitting on his kitchen counter and holding a mop on his shoulder.

Hey, you use what you can get.

For instance:

                                                                                                                

Not a comic character  but...

I did this picture for a former co-worker in exchange for his photographing some of my artwork for me. He picked the subject matter and wanted to pose as Caesar.

I took a reference photo of him sitting on a library cart (which became his horse) and holding an umbrella as his sword.

Back to Starman...While I gave Jack an Art Deco border, I gave his unlikely friend The Shade something older and creepier:

The Shade, 2002. Gouache, colored pencils.
Never leaves home without his
trusty shadow critters.

 




A former villain with power over shadows, The Shade was one of the highlights of the comic for me.

My painting of him sort of looks like a Victorian Fred Astaire on acid.

Jane of The Wonderverse, 2002. Gouache, colored pencils.

Speaking of the Victorian era, I did a steampunk cowgirl painting for an independent company in New Mexico called Opposite Numbers. It was for a comic called The Wonderverse and like my own Heaven and the Dead City,
one of its featured characters
was a tough cowgirl.
(There can't be  enough tough cowgirl characters in comics, I decided.)

Here I am playing with border designs again as The Wonderverse's character, Jane, visits London during the days of Jack the Ripper (right):

                                             

 No animals in the few paintings above, but to make up for that I will share with you one last geeky fangirl tribute:


King Ghidorah versus Mothra! 


...From the Godzilla movies (of which I've been a fan since childhood.)










Hmm, I may do a future post on my own monsters and dragons someday...

Yaira and the Dead City

Before I do a post on some  "fan art" paintings I've done, I thought I'd show you something a bit more recent. Infact, I finally finished it this week...

Yaira, 2012. Gouache and colored pencils.


Yaira is a character from my online graphic novel "Heaven and the Dead City"
( http://www.co2comics.com/pages/co2_heaven_and_the_dead_city.html ).


This will hopefully be the cover of Volume Two and is meant to be a companion piece to the Volume One cover that features  the mysterious "gentleman-witch," Swamp. (below)

Yaira is a "runner" (aka, scavenger) for a small settlement outside the ruined walls of the Dead City.

She is an accomplished horsewoman and proficient with several weapons (preferrably anything pointy, but she can handle a lasso with a certain amount of flair...)



She gathers supplies, old medicine and the occasional forbidden book for her people, all the time trying to dodge the deadly guardian golems (called the Beserkers) left inside the city walls.  (She calls them 'Zerkers.)

And you thought your cockroaches were a problem...

For the cover painting of Yaira I first did a drawing in my sketchbook which I then photocopied at a larger size and transferred by lightbox to an 11"x 17" piece of vellum bristol paper (better surface for paints.)

I should say that the border was done separately on a sheet of tracing paper and added afterwards to the sketch. (I only drew half of the entire border and flipped it over on the lightbox so the other side would match in reverse.) I wanted Yaira's border to be sharper in contrast to Swamp's more rounded one to sort of reflect the shape of her arrows.

When I was happy with the finished sketch transferred to bristol paper, I made photocopies again so I could refer back to them when I started painting. (I also loosely painted one of the photocopies to see which colors I wanted to use.) So with the painted photocopy and one of the original sketches taped nearby, I then started work on the actual painting.

I wanted her painting to be in very warm colors (reds, golds and pinks) as opposed to Swamp's very weird, cold blues and greens.

The steps here to a finished illustration may seem like a lot, but this is how I seem to work best!

Faeries, Goddesses and Warrior Women

When in doubt, I always say, paint a faerie picture. Or a goddess. Or a warrior woman.

Before I do some posts about me and comics, I thought I'd share some more paintings I've done of Mythical Ladies...

Artemis, 1999. Gouache and blackboard chalk.

First, we'll start with a goddess. This was a portrait of  a friend of mine and fellow bookstore employee who wanted to pose as Artemis. (I took a reference photo of her in the breakroom of the bookstore holding a yardstick and a dowel rod as her bow and arrow. )

(Note the use again of blackboard chalk for the clouds and mist.)



Since posting this picture a few years ago online, I had a request for it to be used  as an illustration in a British pagan magazine for an article about Artemis.

I didn't get paid for it, but I got a year's subscription! Sweet.

Leaf Faery, 1998. Gouache.

You may have already seen some of my other faerie paintings from my previous posts. For awhile in the mid to late '90's, I was doing quite a lot of them...  I had more than enough ideas because of all the sketchbooks I'd compiled over the years.

This is my ubiquitous Leaf Faery. (Yes, I know, she probably combs her hair with a rake...)

She showed up in an earlier watercolor painting I did about autumn, standing in a wheat field and holding a basket of produce.

Her next appearance will be in the painting I started of the poet John Keats and his poem , "Ode to Autumn."

Here's the original rough drawing from my sketchbook that I transferred onto bristol paper (vellum surface) to also be painted in gouache.

Snow Faery, 2003. Gouache and colored pencils.

Green Faery, 1999. Gouache and colored pencils.

What you can't see very well in this photo of the Snow Faery is that the background is painted in silver metallic gouache which makes the snowflakes easier to see.

Photos never do gold or silver paint justice...















I purposefully put sprigs of wormwood in this faery's hair---one of the key ingredients in absinthe.

And that is quite an elusive shade of lipstick she's wearing...

She and the Snow Faery must buy makeup at the same goth shop.

                           Pine Faery, 2001. Gouache.

The Pine Faery I actually started on a canvas. In oils.  Well, water-soluble oils to be exact. I've always been impatient with oils--not only do they take forever to dry, they take forever to clean up, smell funny and I don't like the greasiness on my hands.
Being a true Water Sign, I thought maybe water-soluble oils would be the solution to my oil painting annoyances...

Nope. For me, at least, water and oil still don't mix and I grumpily started this painting all over again in good ol' reliable gouache.

Kitsune, 2004. Gouache and colored pencils.

Now onto a different type of  faery altogether...

This is a kitsune, a Japanese fox spirit.
They are supernatural foxes who can shapeshift, usually into the form of a desirable man or woman. Some live to cause havoc; some are benign and actually marry humans.

As the fox ages and grows in power and wisdom over the centuries, it grows additional tails. Eventually a one- thousand-year old fox will become completely white and have nine tails.





I have a fondness for foxes and love kitsune myths. I have many books about their Japanese and Chinese variations.

Samurai, 2002. Gouache,acrylic medium, colored pencils.

In staying with the Japanese theme, my local comic book store, Samurai Comics, had a wall of samurai artwork done by customers and some professionals.

I thought they needed a little Girl Power up there so I did this samurai woman.

This is one of the first pictures that I experimented with putting small drops of  acrylic medium in the gouache to make it waterproof. What was much better was my discovery that they actually make acrylic gouache in tubes and now I do a sort of  "underpainting" in the acrylic gouache (I use Holbein Acryla Gouache) and then paint and blend on top with my good ol' Windsor & Newton "regular" gouache.

But what led to my trying this out was actually painting the designs on her kimono!

By the way, the large kanji to her right means "samurai" and the smaller one beneath is "rain." (Or "Raine...")

Siren of Warsaw, 1998. Gouache.

The above mermaid, known as the Siren of Warsaw, guards the Vistula River in Poland and is sort of a Slavic Lady of the Lake. She's the emblem of the city of Warsaw, which my dad assures me is where my ancestors came from. (As well as Slovakia and what was once known as Prussia.)
The rim of the circle in this picture is painted in metallic gold (you can actually tell it's metallic in this picture as opposed to the Snow Faery's silver paint.)

I'm sure the guy to the right is probably waiting for just the right gust of wind...

(Oh, another note. People have asked me about this: If you've noticed I sign my name "Szramska"  rather than "Szramski", it's just that "Szramska" is the feminine version of my last name in Polish, as opposed to the masculine "Szramski" which is what I grew up with. Most Polish-Americans usually just use the masculine form, but I actually am more fond of the feminine version, which is what my grandmother grew up with.)

Owl Watch, 2009. Gouache, colored pencils.

I have about a dozen sketchbooks filled with fantasy pictures like this for "future paintings." Unfortunately, I'm not as fast a painter as I'd like to be (although I've been known to become quite energetic when someone promises me money if I can get it done in a weekend... Then I start making endless pots of coffee...)

But this one wasn't one of those, and infact was one in a stack of drawings I've had for years waiting to be painted. This one I finally got around to, and is bigger than most pictures I do (the average size I work is about 16"x 20"). I used the acrylic gouache "underpainting" I just talked about, with blended gouache and light colored pencil "glazing" on top.

Basically, I just wanted an excuse to paint a barn owl, my favorite type of owl. They have heart-shaped faces, sort of "toasted marshmallow" coloring and their eyes are dark, which is unlike the yellow eyes most other owls have. The woman in the picture, however, does have yellow eyes.

And finally our last picture for this post is one I did for my friend Kristin as a wedding present:

This idea was suggested by my sister, Victoria, because of Kris' love of dragons.


I don't think the dragon in this picture is meant to be her husband, but I could be wrong...

















Coming up next: I will talk about some pictures I did of another kind of mythical people...

All This and Heaven and the Dead City...

   With a fixed determination
    Entered I each habitation,
    But they were all tenantless;
    All was utter loneliness,
    All was deathless desolation.
                              -- Christina Rossetti,
                                       "The Dead City"




Paint an ongoing webcomic comic by hand? Are you out of your freakin' MIND??

Yes, this is something I ask myself on a daily basis.

But still, here we have "Heaven and the Dead City" and it's something that's been about 25 years in the making.

The cover of the first volume of "Heaven and the Dead City",
 with title graphics by Bill Cucinotta.

 In 2010, an old friend named Bill Cucinotta contacted me and asked if I wanted to contribute a comic story to his and Gerry Giovinco's new and awesome online CO2 Comics.  ( http://www.co2comics.com/)  First off, I don't know how Bill found me since to all my former comic book cohorts from the early '90's, I may have well dropped off the face of the earth. But find me Bill did and he kindly asked if I had anything I might want to contribute.

"Well, there is this story I've been working on for awhile..." 

Understatement.

Even though Bill hadn't seen a single panel from this "story", he trusted me with producing serialized pages of it on a fairly regular basis. ("Fairly regular" I say because I've sometimes missed my own self-imposed deadlines for when the new pages should go up...)

And now the story is three chapters in and each new page I paint I'm learning as I go. I'm discovering what can be done with the gouache I use to paint it, how using darker outlines in certain cases are graphically better for emphasis, etc, etc. Nuts and bolts stuff. This has been "Heaven and the Dead City" for me and it is by far equally the most exciting and most demanding project I've ever attempted.

It didn't start off that way. Let's take the time machine back to 1982, Moore College of Art in Philadelphia when I was a student there. (Two years later I would transfer to Pratt Institute in New York.) We all had to keep sketchbooks and I remember how incredibly dull it was to practice drawing the everyday stuff around me. Even though it is  excellent practice to draw "mundane" stuff like still life arrangements, the view outside your dorm window, the car parked on the street, I would have none of that. I wanted to draw what interested me most. So...

I started to fill the sketchbooks with monsters, knights with swords, winged lions, fauns, faeries, angels, mermaids and castles...etc. And some dark mysterious guy in a frock coat.

 You get the picture.
Unfortunately, to my horror, we all had "Sketchbook Review" with the professors: they would take a look at what we'd all been drawing in our free time. When I showed one of my teachers, an elderly Russian man, these pages of epic geek-girl fantasy, I was surprised that he was actually delighted by it. "You're quite a romantic, aren't you?" he asked my embarrassed 20-year-old self.
So I learned two things in my freshman year of art school:
       1) I was still a Colossal Geek (albeit, a romantic one); and
       2) Always keep really embarrassing stuff in a separate sketchbook.

Which brings me to how what would someday be called "Heaven and the Dead City" came about. I started a "graphic novel" in said separate sketchbook, purely for my own entertainment. I had always been a habitual story writer as a teenager (kept drawers of "epics" I never showed another living soul. Yes, I still have them, as cringeworthy as they may be.),  but this was something new, based on the resurgence of my interest in comics in my twenties. I started hanging around comic shops in Philly and it rubbed off in my sketchbook. I brought this "story-sketchbook" to my classes with me and my first readers (besides my sister, Victoria, Swamp's biggest fan) were other students in the class who asked me daily if I had drawn new pages to read.

Without even thinking about why I was doing it, I started a story about a ruined city, a girl on horseback ... and a dark mysterious guy in a frock coat. (Well, what else? My favorite book was "Jane Eyre", after all.)

More recent sketch of Swamp.
He does "sinister" well.

The mysterious stranger needed a name. There was a creepy Talking Heads song on the radio a lot that year called "Swamp"  (the one with the growling refrain, "Hi, hi, hi, hi, hi, hi.") and it stuck to the mysterious stranger like glue. The girl on horseback was sort of a reverse Jane Eyre when meeting Mr. Rochester (she meets him while riding a horse, not the other way around), and her name would become Yaira. Along with the haunted Dead City that Yaira scavenges,  there was also another city far away, all bright and shiny... and corrupt. And full of even more characters with "special" abilities. And I went back and forth in my sketchbook between the characters in the two different cities until they finally converged and met each other. Plus there was magick, ghosts, monsters...and these weird whirligig things with eyeballs.

Sketch of Yaira for the painted
 cover of Volume 2 .

However, I told myself I wouldn't take drawing this story seriously until I learned how to draw perspective somewhat properly. There would be pages and pages of cityscapes that needed to look halfway convincing and when I started art school I didn't know the difference between one-point, two-point and three-point perspective. And how exactly did you find the horizon line, when you couldn't see the horizon? Pespective to me had once seemed scary and mechanical. Now --
Perspective is my friend and we hang out and have coffee together.

(The horizon line is always at the eye level of the viewer. These and other things about the wonderful world of perspective-drawing  I actually taught myself from books, the same way I taught myself how to paint... more-or-less... Though I'm no master of perspective now, I'm light years better than I was in college, to be sure.)

This was all pretty ambitious to be contained in just a sketchbook but I never actually thought about pulling it out of those pages for another two decades, though the story kept getting older with me and (hopefully) maturing. I began to seriously rework it right past the new millennium, convinced I was going to put it on "good paper" and make a proper comic book out of it. However, after September 11, the prospect of drawing a destroyed city was not very appealing to me and the project got shelved again. But I was far from giving up on it and it took a different turn as I wrote it a new beginning.

By the time Bill contacted me, I had three chapters started and about 70 pages of penciled art that I wasn't quite sure how to progress with. I didn't know a thing about digital art and I wasn't a particularly good inker (or so I told myself then)... should I try to paint the thing? With my old friend, gouache? How much work would that entail?

Well, a lot, I discovered. I was also handlettering it. But for me, there has always been something therapeutic about making a picture from start to finish by hand...A type of "Look what I made, Mom!" "Oh, neat, let's hang it on the refrigerator!" mindset.  Maybe it's also some sort of Arts and Crafts mentality that my archaic-minded brain gets into. I really just like shoving paint around with a brush. But I was up for the challenge to myself.

"Yeah, I'm gonna paint this baby!"

The decision to paint in black and white (or more accurately in shades of gray) came about due to my original plans to self-publish the story. It's always cheaper cost-wise to print in black and white. Also, had I added color as another element (other than in the cover) it would take me AGES to get anything done. So I tried for a gothic black and white movie effect.

As I worked and saw each subsequent page reproduced on CO2 Comics' website, I saw what I could do differently and what could use enhancement. I started to learn things about the medium I had chosen to work in and what things worked and what didn't. The more pages I produced and the  deeper I got into the project, I began to learn what I was actually capable of doing. With each new page I painted, I learned a new working method.

I had a very short and scattered comics "career" (not the word I was really looking for, but it'll do...) in the early 1990's and this is the subject of an upcoming post. I pulled away from comics as a storytelling medium out of frustration about the industry in general in those years. Things have changed a lot since then, but I had already retreated and went back to doing stories on my own, in private, only for me in my sketchbooks again-- and that's what "Heaven and the Dead City" is a product of, me trying to entertain myself. (Also much like the Pre-Raph cartoons I've started doing recently--see previous post...)

CO2 Comics gave me the scary and admittedly ambitious experiment in trying to take this long story out of my sketchbooks and into the new realm of  webcomics. So that's what we have here.  http://www.co2comics.com/pages/co2_heaven_and_the_dead_city.html  I will write future posts about the ongoing process, the story and the characters. And my own adventure in writing, drawing and painting a story I began when I was about 18 years old continues...