Why San Diego Comic Con 2011 was great

Why was Comic Con great this year? That is a fully loaded question. There is no short and quick answer to that. Comic Con was great this year for many reasons. I told myself that I will come into it with a fresh pair of eyes and ears. I have been keeping an eye on the art world so I had some people in mind that I wanted to visit.

First on my list was Geof Darrow. I bought his Shaolin Cowboy comic books on ebay and I bought his sketchbook at the Con and had him sign it. As you may know that he made designs for the matrix and is well known for his Hard Boiled comics. I like his art because I can relate to what he draws, kung fu movies, westerns, and he has a wider range of interest because he also made some Totoro sketches.

Second my my list was to visit Alex Nino. He had a panel on creating dynamic action poses. He did concept design for Disney's Mulan from environment to some character drawings. To be truthful, he can't talk and draw at the same time so he just stayed silent while another panelist talked. The panel was terrible because it was unorganized and had technical projection difficulties. However, he had a table at artist's alley and I bought a very nice $15 "con sketch" from him. Not too many people visited him there so I think he got bored and spent a lot of time on my drawing. By the way, he did some Conan issues in the 1980's so I asked him to do a "quick" conan for me.

Third was to go to Scott Robertson's panel on creative design. I've been following his work for years now because I bought his books and how to dvds from Gnomon Workshop. He is a technical illustrator and teacher at Art Center School of Design in Pasadena. It was the school I wanted to go to to get my bachelor's degree but couldn't afford to. In 2001, they reviewed my portfolio and said that I can be accepted as soon as I figure out my method of payment. Back then the tuition alone was 30k a year. The work load was 15 units, they did not accept any transfer credits from SDSU, so I'd have to go for 3.5 yrs. 15 units of art classes was different from regular classes because the classes actually last 3 hrs long each. That's five classes, ten meetings a week, so you spend 30 hrs in the classroom. Then they expect that you spend the same amount of class time at home for doing homework. And some how I have to have income to pay for all of this while I'm attending. Anyways, he's a great artist and he publishes a bunch of art books which are geared towards professional level "how to" books. His panel was awesome and way to detailed to squeeze into one hour let alone tell you all about it in type. Scott taught a bunch of great artists in the current new generation including Khang Le. This guy's work is amazing. See the links below

http://www.designstudiopress.com/
http://www.drawthrough.com/
http://www.khangle.net/

Awesome thing was that he gave me a free book on drawing cars for asking a smart question. My question was, when you have to figure out the bone structure of a weird animal that you're trying to study and you can only find external surface pictures of the animal, how do you find out how it's bone's function? Like say a deep ocean fish or some weird animal from the amazon. They said bone clones, visit science museum and you can actually purchase bone clones, a model of the bones of the animal if you can find it. Also, there are places online where you can purchase videos like animal planet for specific animals.

Fourth was attacking my acheles heel; a panel on digital inking by Brian Halberin. The reason that I was overwhelmed on Violent Nights was because I couldn't handle the work load of penciling and inking while I was worrying about lettering also. Well, he showed us an quick and easy way to ink using photoshop.

We went to a few panels on writing. One covered 12 steps to the Hero's Journey, a good review from Joseph Cambell's book. One was about Epic Fantasy, what makes it interesting and "epic" which covered stories like Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and stuff like that. One was about creator owned comics which was awesome because the guy who wrote Walking Dead was in the panel. You can download the comic which won best ongoing series, and watch the TV show. I like it a lot and the author was a really cool guy.

Eileen and I went with a friend to a free figure drawing workshop accross the street called Trickster and we drew along with David Mack. Eileen bought a couple of books from him and it was fun. He's known for Kabuki and I knew him because I bought his Daredevil TPB a long time ago. I also got a chance to meet Greg Ruth. Great art, but expensive. $600 for a 5x7" panel from Conan: Born on the Battlefield, a book worth buying if you buy anything. That was one of the cheaper and smallest piece on hand. I saw a Frank Frazetta ink sketch about that size priced at $12,000 of a girl figure by the way.

I only bought one other thing which was a book called Vent by Udon Comics. It was half off of their asking price at the beginning of the con plus I got a free art print of Blanka. The artists in the group were there and I got them to sign the book. They had lots of art technique tutorials and it covered a lot of work done in photoshop for coloring, sketching, and designing. If you're not familiar with their stuff, they did a lot of work for Capcom for character and concept designs for games like the newer Streetfighter games but 15 years ago they started out as a fan art group. The few artists were professionals not working for Capcom but loved Capcom art, so they got rights to publish art books and now comic books and video games as well. They are a good group of artists but what attracted me to them was one named Arnold Tsang. His character designs are spectacular. You can see them here:
http://arnistotle.deviantart.com/
He was at the booth so I got him to sign the book also.

I took my friend Yuho from Kyoto and Eileen to a Drawing with Jim Lee panel because they've never seen him draw and talk so that was fun seeing that they enjoyed themselves. Nothing different than what we saw in the old VHS I bought back in the 90's. His job as a copublisher for DC Comics lasts from 8am to 8pm, then he draws his comic book from 11pm to 4am during the week. Crazy schedule. I took my nephew and niece Ryan and Iris to a couple of drawing for teens and kids panels and bought them a cool Lego set. It was a Star Wars Ship with over 1000 pieces and they put it together in only 3 hours and 20 minutes. Anyways, they loved it and the Lego booth was nice enough to give us two complimentary kids tickets to Legoland. They will have a blast I'm sure.

Lastly, it was my first year dressing up. I was wearing a Shinsen Gumi outfit, they were Kenshin's enemies but in history they transitioned from being Samurai to Imperial policemen. Kenshin's rival was Hajime Saitoh, a very famous member of the Shinsen Gumi. I wore the outfit all day from 8am to 10pm. I guess you saw pictures of me on Facebook by now and Eileen as Chun Li. I ran into a caucasian girl dressed up as Kenshin so we took a few photos of fighting poses. We had several guest badges so we were able to let family and friends use them so it was nice to know that they had a good time also. I think that sums it up.