Sketchbooks! We got Sketchbooks! Yay!

Last Friday, the school I teach at (Toronto Cartoonists Workshop) had an open house for students to come meet the instructors – which include the tremendously talented Leonard Kirk, Dave Ross, and Eric Kim amongst others.

A big part of what I teach at the school involves the rough work of comics, the layout, the thumbnail, the sketched figure on the page, and I wanted to have something to show to students that involved sketch work and ideas in progress, so they can see the more candid side of an artists life.

To that end I edited together some warm-up drawings, some rough work, some scribbles and doodles and bears (oh my!) from from a small sampling of my sketchbooks, and put them into a never-before-seen 48 page collection.

We printed up a small box of ’em to sell at the open house, and did a lovely brisk business, thank you very much…but we’ve got a handful left over.

It looks like this, with a wraparound cover.

A few of you asked me to make the book available on the blog here, and that’s what I’m doing today, but to be brutally honest, I’m not sure what the methods involved will be…Paypal?  Barter?  A pound of flesh?  I’m fairly sure we’re asking twenty dollars for the book, but my wife Keiren is by FAR, the better person to ask these vulgar details of.

I’m assuming Keiren will pop on the blog in a moment and supply some of these details below. **  If you’re reading this before she’s come on to finish this blog post, please come back in an hour or two, and it’ll all be solved.  I’m off to my bed.

**(send an email to tybunny@gmail.com, with your mailing address–books are $20/Cdn plus shipping. We’ll email you shipping costs, confirm purchase, send you a PayPal invoice).

Ty the Guy OUT!

Here now, your BONUS sketchbook moment.

I'm fairly sure his legs are broken.

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Don’t forget to pick up Mad Magazine this week:

Including a few pages featuring Spider-Man by Ty the Guy.

Ty Templeton’s Sketchbook! Yay!!

Ty had this idea that he was going to have lots of free time once he finished up his last assignment–ha! He forgot that it’s “that” month. He’d started drawing up a great Bun Toon for last Saturday but he had to finish work on the sketchbook he’s having printed up, so he posted a sequel to Son of Bun Toons instead (and there’s more! Taylor had a lot of comic book ideas in him at the time…these days, he’s much more about the video games).

But the good news is that Ty finished all the work he needed to do putting together pages for the sketchbook, and I finally finished all the work I needed to do prepping it for print.

And all for what? For this Friday December 9! Toronto Cartoonists Workshop is hosting a Faculty Art Show for its very own staff members. Ty will be there, with Leonard Kirk, Dave Ross, and Eric Kim. The guys will have artwork for show and sale, and will be answering questions about their upcoming classes.

587A College Street (at Clinton), 7-11pm. $4 suggested donation ($$ go to the Toronto Public Library), and a cash bar.

(I’ll be the woman at Ty’s table–stop by and say hello!)

Keiren

Unseen Sketchbook land. Dredd! Batman! Headless nudes!

Hey internet.  I’m actually drawing something in my lap as I type this, I’m so busy finishing up something that should have been done yesterday, but I wanted to pass along a couple of these images from sketchbooks past.

The school at which I teach (Toronto Cartoonists Workshop) is having a faculty show in a few weeks, and it’s been suggested I put together a sketchbook for the event, since I’m one of the few guys on earth who doesn’t have one available at conventions.

Wife insists we do this, I concede, and much scanning is planned.  So I’m posting a very small sample from just the first scanned book out of the twenty or thirty sketchbooks I have in my studio.   This will take time, in between my other gigs, to sort out anything worth looking in this vast wasteland of nude/figure studies and odd doodles, but I’m told someone might want to look at some of these pages, so I present a few of them before they get collected up in the book.   We’re just at the start of the winnowing process, so I have no idea whether or not any of these pages will make the final cut.

The Dredded Sketchbook begins.

From the nineties, when DC had the rights to Judge Dredd – I was working on a  Dredd pitch right around the time the series ended.  The script was written, or at least plotted, but it got stopped before any art was done.   Dredd figures abound in sketchbook pages of this period, either because I was thinking about him a lot, or because I was hoping to draw the script I was writing, I honestly can’t remember.  All my 90’s sketchbooks have Dredd pages in them somewhere.

Saw a guy wearing this on the history channel and HAD to sketch it before it left my head.  Back in the crusades, apparently, knights would wear candles on their helmets in crown formation, so they could raid the heathen locals at night, and because it was scary as fuck.   It’s not so much the sketch that pleases me about this doodle, but the idea that occurred to me as I was drawing it;  it looked like  a halo, and perhaps that was the actual purpose all along?

The typical thought stream of a sketchbook page.  I’m doing a warm up figure drawing and I see something on the history channel about hand paintings on the outside of caves being a universal image found all over the world, and I start to wonder if it began with bloody hand prints, made by early hunters, and almost without asking it to, my hand draws a sketch of a caveman killing the bunny.   Let’s hope there are no psychiatrists looking in at the blog today.

Speaking of cave-men.

Met this guy in an elevator at a Star Trek convention in Niagara Falls, sketched this in my book as soon as I sat down in the hotel room.  There was something about the crazy Klingon eyes and the double chin that made it all magical to me.

Last year for Christmas, my wife asked me to do a drawing of Batman for a neighbourhood kid as a present.  I treated the gig like any professional job and did three sketches of the idea for approval from an editor in my sketchbook.  (I think my wife stepped into the role).  My editor picked the Batman in the rain one, but I’ve really come to LOVE that dropping cape shot, I think because Batman’s mask is an almost perfect ying/yang balance of black and white in simple shapes.

Here’s the rainy shot in its final form, by the way.

So very Christmas-y.

Ty the Guy OUT!

Here now, your sketchbook BONUS moment:

Nudes and Judge Dredds.  It was bound to happen.