Every day, bro.

I hope you don't drown in the process.

It’s raining heavily. They’re both soaked wet, staring at the ocean as the giant storm waves break in the distance. It’s the end of the road and they both know it.

Bodhi asks Johnny Utah:

“Still surfing?”

“Every day, bro. Every day.”

—

This end sequence of Point Break, one of the ultimate bro movies of the 90s, speaks to the inner truth of every artist that, if you want to give it your best at what you do, you gotta do it every day.

Wanna be a better writer? Write every day.

Wanna be a better artists? Draw every day.

Bá and I, when we’re giving lectures or workshops, often compare starting out in comics to surfing, because there’s the point break that you have to pass in order to get to the waves, which is the shift from being a comics’ fan into being a comics’ author and realising comics which you read super fast take a long time to make, and they’re fun and dynamic to read but can be monotonous, repetitive and frustrating to draw, and you gotta work really hard to get better at something that is so easy and pleasurable to consume, and it’s during this hard shift that most aspiring comic book authors give up. They simply don’t make it through the point break, don’t have the stamina to keep paddling, and they drown.

(upon revisiting that last scene of the movie, I realised there is no “bro” in the Keanu Reeves line, so I blame Matt Fraction and his run on Hawk Guy and the humorous speech pattern of the tracksuit Russian mafia)

WHY DID I THINK OF THAT MOVIE?

I was talking with Bá about practicing drawing with digital tools. We have no intention to completely replace our beloved pen, brush, ink and paper, but there are drawings and there are stories – and there are newsletters, for that matter – which could benefit from the creative windows different tools can open.

If you want to get better at any tool, you gotta practice. “Every day, bro”.

Every day.

The drawing above was one of these tests I’ve been making with digital drawing tools. On my weekly live drawing broadcast on Twitch every Monday night – which I named MoonDay –, I’ll be exploring the digital drawing tools I have available, and which ones I’m more pleased with the results. This drawing was made last Monday with ProCreate on an iPad. I used the”Peppermint” pencil tool for the initial sketch, then the “Gesinski Ink” inking tool for the line work, and the “Turpentine” painting tool for the color on the hair, to try to give it a more expressive dry brush look.

I did this second drawing that same night, using another program called Clip Studio Paint, which we have been using a lot for the last two years to pencil pages (which we then print a light blue version of those pencils to traditionally ink on paper), but don’t usually use to ink anything. This second image was a first attempt to explore a little more the inking tools and really try to achieve a look I’m satisfied with.

I used the “brush pen - India ink” painting tool to ink this image, and I was surprised how similar to my paper drawings it looked in the end, at least the ones where my line is cleaner, when I’m leaning more towards the Jeff Smith brush stroke than the Craig Thompson brush stroke.

I’ll keep experimenting on my live sessions, and I’ll try to keep posting the process in here.

the list

I saw online the request, and then read at Kelly Sue’s newsletter, about this directory/compilation list of comic book creators’ newsletters. And, assuming from the new subscribers I got after Kelly Sue’s posting, some might have discovered me through this list. So, by linking to it HERE, I expect I can help you discover at least one or two more authors in there.

Earlier that day…

I started my daily doodling exercise on paper that same Monday I made the digital exercise. Looking at some fun reference pictures from either Instagram or Pinterest, I started doodling straight with a parallel pen, without a preliminary sketch. The parallel pen is another tool I want to practice and explore, with its shifts from fine line to thicker one, and then what kind of look I can get when I get a brush with just water and I paint over the sketch, and what that does to the non-waterproof ink of the pen. One of the cool discoveries of this particular sketch was the purplish red wine color I got with the washes just by having whatever was left from the red ink cartridge I had inside the pen before mix inside the pen with the black ink cartridge I’m using now.

IS THAT AN UMBRELLA?

Maybe you’ll notice I drew the Umbrella Academy logo with the sparrow on top on the parallel pen sketch, which is the teaser logo of the third season of the Umbrella show at Netflix. I was thinking about the show, since the previous weekend the shooting of the third season wrapped.

Watching an entire season being made during the pandemic was super cool. In our current virtual engagement with the rest of the World, I think we started to pay a little more attention to details of every virtual interaction, and maybe because of that we paid more attention to every new script that arrived, and the dailies shot on the previous days, and the eventual glimpses of the crew following safety protocol among the the actors at the beginnings and endings of some of the shots.

We still have a long way to go with this third season. The first rough cuts of the episodes have started to arrive, and that will keep us busy for the rest of the year.

In the meantime, stay safe out there. Take care of each other, use your masks when you think it might help keep you and everyone around you safer, and cherish the moments when you can finally take the masks off, and pay attention to each other smiles.

Remember to smile.

Remember to smile every day.

Every day, bro.

Be safe. Be kind. Be curious
Pa-ZOW!

Fábio Moon
Moon Base, São Paulo
September 6th, 2021