§ Nice Art: the work of Chinese artist RLoN Wang, via
§ Marjorie Liu, Kieron Gillen and Kate Leth picked some comics for summer beach reading, and they have good taste.
§ Gabrielle Bell is cartooning again! Huzzah!
§ Chicagoist profiles Gina Wynbrandt and her irresistible comic ‘Someone Please Have Sex With Me’
Released in May by 2dcloud, Someone Please Have Sex With Me is a five-comic collection, filled with vignettes about celebrity worship and sexual desperation from a virtuosic artist. At just 25, Wynbrandt has been featured in The Best American Comics 2015, nominated for an Ignatz Award. Now the Chicago-based artist has published her first book, too. Someone Please Have Sex With Me has a home on the same shelf where I keep my tarot cards and wedding rings: it’s an altar, devoted to things I truly love. And, man, I really love this book.
§ Well no sooner have the visions caused by Chester Brown’s Mary Wept subsided when another indie comic great is putting out his OWN version of the Bible: Gilbert Hernandez is digging in with his own sex-centric version, “Garden of Flesh” which promises to show just HOW Adam and Eve sinner and what Noah and his family did to pass time on the Ark, as only Beto can imagine it. CBR has a few SFW preview pages and an interview:
Where is the line between erotic and pornographic? Is there a distinction at all? Where does this book fall on that spectrum?
The difference is in the eye of the beholder. Some depictions of sex are pleasant, as in my book, and some are ugly, as in others. Most people can’t see a difference.
And Gilbert will be pretty busy for the rest of the year:
“Love and Rockets” will be returning as a 32-page comic book, three times a year. Vol 4 Issue #1 will be out in Sept, I hope. “Maria M. vol. 2” will be out before the end of the year, as well as “Blubber #3” and two new comics called “The Fritz Companion #1,” which will feature the back story on “Garden of the Flesh,” and “Psychodrama Illustrated #1,” which will feature “Twilight Zone”-type stories, sometimes featuring Fritz in a role. That’s if I can get these out in time. It’s pretty tight.
§ Augie De Blieck Jr. writes to tell us that he’s launched a new project called LearnCSP.com which will feature tips and tricks for using Clip Studio Paint (formerly Manga Studio), to create his cartoony art.
Existing documentation for Clip Studio Paint’s 1.5 million users comes from the creators and distributors of the application, CelSys, and SmithMicro.
The nearly 900 page PDF that comes with the application is not exactly a beginner’s tutorial. The videos that SmithMicro produces with Doug Hills are a great help, but focus tool by tool. When you have a question on how to use the application to do a specific thing, things get a little murkier. That’s the ground LearnCSP.com covers.
“Google turned out to be the website I used most to learn Clip Studio Paint,” said Augie De Blieck Jr., the website’s founder and writer. “There’s a lot of help out there for new users, but it’s scattered across YouTube and DeviantArt and Pinterest, amongst other websites. And lots of it is based on older versions of CSP. LearnCSP.com answers the questions I found myself having as I learned the program: Quick, focused, up to date, and all in one place.”
LearnCSP.com updates two to three times a week. With helpful videos, animated GIFs, and examples of De Blieck’s own art to illustrate the lessons, LearnCSP.com provides a friendly and informative vehicle to solving an artist’s problems. Early tutorials include how to pick the right skin tone for a character, how to choose the right canvas size when you’re just starting, and how to mimic the look and feel of popular Copic markers digitally.
