Lilly Ledbetter, whose landmark lawsuit against Goodyear Tire & Rubber led to the Fair Pay Act of 2009, passed away on Saturday, October 12, 2024. Hired in 1970, Ledbetter initially earned the same as her male colleagues, but over time her pay fell behind, which she only discovered in 1998 through an anonymous note. Despite workplace policies that discouraged salary discussions, she decided to fight the pay discrimination sparking a legal battle that brought her fight to the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, they ruled in favor of Goodyear saying that she filed her lawsuit too late.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissenting opinion motivated Lilly Ledbetter to take her pay discrimination case to Congress. This painting celebrates President Obama's landmark legislation and the first bill he signed into law. The law was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, and it extended the time frame for workers to file pay discrimination claims by resetting the 180-day limit with each discriminatory paycheck. Ledbetter never actually received compensation for the gap in pay, but her fight paved the way to further empower women in the workplace. Which is exactly what I chose to celebrate in this painting. I was incredibly inspired by Obama's first act as president because it was a stark difference to the law President Geoge W. Bush's first signed as President: The Economic Growth and Tax Relief Act signed in 2001 which was intended to stimulate the economy but disproportionately benefited the wealthiest individuals. I sent prints of these paintings to a friend, Yosi Sergeant, who said he would "pass them around the office." Unbeknownst to me at the time, he happened to be working in the Obama Administration with Valerie Jarrett's office at the White House. Since then, I have gone forward in life with the assumption that my artwork has been displayed in the White House. Although I can't officially confirm this, I would love to hear someone prove me right (or wrong.) To see more of my work, or to purchase a print of this painting, visit my store!
0 Comments
In my OC Art Studios Visual Storytelling Class with Caleb Cleveland, students develop the color scripts for a short story or comic. I took the opportunity to create my first color script for the graphic novel that I'm working on.
I knew that I wanted to have really dramatic lighting and some serious moody colors, so I had a fun time exploring color palettes and applying them to some pivotal emotional beats in the story. This Pixar in a Box Art of Lighting video is really helpful in explaining how lighting and color is used in a movie and can easily be utilized for creating the same look to your graphic novels. If you want to learn more about painting color and lighting, check out our online interactive course, or our Visual Storytelling course where you can do this very exercise for your own comic project. I don't know how to model anything in 3D so I hired a friend to sculpt my robot and my vehicle in Blender. Having a 3D sculpt of a vehicle is so handy for getting an accurate depiction from any angle. It's going to make my dynamic shots a lot easier to draw. Since I won't be struggling with drawing it from any angle, I won't be avoiding more difficult shots since I have a tool to help me position the vehicle from any point of view that I want. I started using Clip Studio Paint and I love that I can actually import the 3d objects and rotate them within the program. I can then lower the opacity and draw straight from the sculpt reference. Brilliant.
Knowing what your characters look like from the front, back, side and 3/4 views is going to help you draw your comic faster, especially if you're not designing it as you go. Nonetheless, I found myself moving on to the sketch phase without some of these turnaround designs and I had to imagine what these characters looked like from panel to panel. I also had to redesign my main characters after drawing them a hundred times and realizing that I much preferred the look of them the way I actually drew in my sketches when I compared it to the turnarounds I had originally designed. Below you'll see the animated turnarounds I did to ensure consistency in the views. The bits that gave me the most trouble were the ponytails and hair. I didn't bother to color them all in because I used this as a tool to make sure the drawings are accurate. If you are working on a graphic novel or a picture book, it really is helpful to have a turnaround sheet for your characters drawn up before you begin sketching your story. It'll help save you time and frustration in the long run. Also, if you're not sure how to do this and are interested in learning, consider signing up for my Character Design course in the future! I do notice that the leg stripes are popping a bit in the turnaround here. If I had the time, I'd go back and tweak that. But I've got lots more things to design, so this will do for now. How does one start the process of creating images for a 240 page graphic novel? With ideas. Ideas drawn small and quickly to explore the various facets of your storytelling process--- from page layout to panel composition. This process is called 'thumbnailing' because the drawings are supposed to be very small. Lots of comic artists do this in different ways. Some people will draw on their actual script with a thumbnail page layout in the margins. Some people draw on post it notes. I drew my thumbnails digitally which was really easy and had some benefits. One of the benefits was that I could create a template for the size of the page, then copy and paste that on an entire sheet so I could see the flow of several pages at once. Working digitally made it easier to adjust panels and layouts by using the transform tool. If I drew something too small or too big, I could easily make an adjustment to the size of it. If I needed to copy a panel and duplicate it to keep a sequential movement consistent, I could easily copy and paste it. One thing I had to keep in mind was that the zoom feature could hinder my process of keeping my drawings rough. I have a tendency to zoom in on an image and get too involved in the nitty gritty details. I solved this problem by keeping my dpi to 100 pixels per inch instead of 300 dpi. The low resolution of the image would prevent me from working too detailed because the more I zoomed into the document, the more pixelated it would become. This forced me to work large and rough. Churning out 240 pages of thumbnails in a short period of time is tough. I am poor at time management skills but am actively working on improving. I can proudly say that I am better at it than I was years ago, but I'm always trying to get better at it. I realized that I needed to gamify the process for me to make it more fun and less "work". I started to time myself to see how long it took me to complete one page of thumbnails. After doing a few in the beginning, I realized it took me around 10 minutes to complete a page. My goal was to get faster at completing them, so I started writing the start time and stop time for each page. Depending on the complexity of the page, some layouts would take longer than others. But at least I was documenting information that helped me to realize how many pages I needed to complete per day in order to meet my deadline.
Seeing the numbers really helped me to visualize the abstract concept of time. Also, my thumbnails started out REALLY super tight in the beginning. I was still getting accustomed to drawing these characters that I had designed and their shapes weren't yet ingrained in my brain. A few days into the process, I was able to rough them in pretty quickly, but they also started to look like blobs. In the end, I just needed to figure out the 'camera angles' of each shot (storyboard lingo) or the point of view for each panel composition. When I was done, I sent these to my editor and art director, along with the manuscript, and prayed that they were able to figure out what I drew! |