blog: stuff I made

Writing (and more design)

Continued from Part 1

After composing each image, I like to print out each one to see how it looks on paper, then carry the papers around in my pockets for a while, scribbling on them whenever I come up with a scrap of verse. Taking walks is good for this — the rhythm of walking helps me think in poetic meter, but it’s also nice to be in front of a computer with rhymezone.com and OSX’s OED Thesaurus widget open.

It’s tough but fun coming up with explanations for all the weird images — some flow right out and others are a real challenge. Again, sometimes I’ll just start writing and see where it goes; other times I’ll get an idea for the gag or explanation for the image, and then have to work backwards to fill in all the details within the structure of rhyme and meter. When I think I’ve got something that makes sense, I’ll run it by a few other folks to make sure it tracks and makes sense — thanks are due to my wife Nikki and to Kris for late-night help at key points in this process!

The next step is to lay out each card for printing. I know there are neat calendar-generating plugins for InDesign and Excel templates you can download, but I didn’t use any of those because my life is made stronger by challenges. Kind Twitter volunteer @dharmakate helped lay out the grids and updated the dates for 2010!

Each year’s calendar has some sort of overall design theme — nothing specific, just an aesthetic that’s represented in the choice of fonts, layout of elements, etc. For example, here are some elements from the 2008 calendar:

…Which, because I like to make things new and better and not at all because I am obsessed with reinventing the wheel every single time I do anything (not at all, do you hear me), I changed the format to a slightly more modern look for 2009:

And now, for 2010, I decided to go more modern still — after years of immersion in the ephemeral art of the late 19th Century, I’m now starting to become fascinated by mass media from the 1910s, and I think this year’s design reflects that:

The use of flourishes and ornaments also allows some nice touches such as the crossbar of the ‘A’ in ‘August’.

Each month’s title, as well as the entirety of the title cards, will be printed in gold ink, and they can’t really be done justice by a graphic — they look really sharp. (The other printing is done in black ink — this year on natural-white linen cardstock.)

The calendar grids are all laid out in Illustrator. I use the amazing program Cocoapotrace to create vector versions of the final collaged images for each month, then place them on each card with their verses. The cards are each 8.5″ x 5.5″ (half of a standard US sheet of paper), but the GOCCO printer can only print on half that size — so the cards have to be laid out so that each element takes up no more than half the space. Each calendar grid, and each image/verse section, will be printed separately using its own screen. (Since the monthly titles will be gold, they’ll need their own screen as well. More on this later). But at this stage, for compositional purposes, I lay it all out as a unit, so I know how each final card will look — then I print these out to act as reference for the printing process.

Here’s the final card design for the image in the previous post. Tomorrow we’ll prepare to start printing!

Tomorrow: Part 3: The Gathering Storm

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OBLIGATORY STORE REMINDER: Today (Tuesday the 15th) is the LAST DAY for guaranteed domestic shipping at my TopatoCo store. I’m still shipping calendars through Sunday in my own store, but they’re gonna arrive when they’re gonna arrive.

This will be a daily series this week, as my wife and I finish up production on the 2010 Wondermark Calendar! But first:

A BRIEF NOTE ABOUT BOOKS

TopatoCo was showing some of my books as “out of stock” as recently as yesterday, but I’ve received word that their coffers have been replenished — so, you know, have at. I should also note that they now have the only remaining copies of my very first collection, The Annotated Wondermark — less than forty remain before the print run (the fifth printing, if you can believe it!) is totally sold out, and we won’t be reprinting them until next year sometime.

Or, if you’d like to combine a book order with a calendar order, I do have copies of the two Dark-Horse-published Wondermark books in my in-house store. Look, I know. It is all very confusing! But, so is life.

ADDITIONALLY

I am leaving town for the holidays on the evening of December 20! That means that NOON PACIFIC TIME on the 20th is the order deadline for pre-Christmas shipping for anything purchased from my in-house store (including calendars). TopatoCo will continue shipping probably until the crack of Christmas Day or until their fingers fall off, whichever happens last. (Though some shirt sizes are already gone, as are some card designs. You got to get on this stuff!)

Okay that’s done. Thank you for indulging me this brief digression!

NOW THEN

HOW TO MAKE A CALENDAR, Part 1: Design

The Wondermark Calendar, for those who’ve not seen it before, is a hand-made item that consists of fourteen cards resting in a brass easel. Besides two covers, there are twelve calendar cards, each featuring an image and a brief piece of verse. Here’s one from a few years ago:

Each card is screenprinted by hand using a GOCCO screenprinter (more on that later this week). We only print a small run of the calendars, and they’ve sold out each year. Each calendar is individually signed and numbered, and optionally includes the easel — or you can get just a “refill” if you’ve already got an easel from a previous year.

The last two years, I simply found images (in my collection of old books) that I thought might work well in the calendar, then used them pretty much unmodified, writing verses to fit. This year, however, I thought I’d do it a little different — I thought I’d make collages from separate images, similar to how I make the comic, to create unique scenes and make the whole thing a bit more interesting.

Now that I’ve done this a few times, I’ve realized that simpler images translate much better in screenprinting than do more elaborate engravings — so this year I kept my eyes open for smallish drawings with cleaner linework. Also, for the sake of consistency, I decided to pull the majority of the images from a single source: 1880s Punch magazine, which I have several giant bound volumes of (click for a closer look):

Those folks on the right-hand page look like good candidates, as do the figures on this page:

I ended up scanning around 60 different images and playing around with them in various configurations, combining and re-combining them in different ways, trying to see what scenarios and stories they suggested.

The way I work is different from many artists, and certainly many cartoonists. While I do often compose the comic’s images to match a previously-written script, I also have great fun at times simply building scenes like a puzzle, not knowing what’s going on until the very end of the process — and sometimes, in the case of the comics, occasionally not knowing what’s going on until I’ve actually written most of the dialogue! I like seeing where it goes and the directions that it takes by itself, and it’s almost more like sculpting with clay, adding pieces and taking them away, than drawing or painting.

Eventually I decided that these characters could work well together:

And with the addition of some objects from my go-to “prop warehouse”, the 1902 Sears-Roebuck catalog…

…An interesting and evocative scene began to develop:

And here are a few more scenes that I composed (you’ll recognize some of the other characters from those earlier scans as well):

I assembled each scene before knowing what would be going on in any of them. It makes the constructive process fun, because there’s no restrictions! Anything is fair game, and the goofier, the better.

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The process continues tomorrow! In the meantime, you can get your very own copy of the calendar here (remember, I’ll be doing pre-Christmas shipping this week only, as I only have about seven days before I leave town). I’ll see you right back here tomorrow for the next installment of this series!

Tomorrow: Part 2: Writing & Designing Each Month