Steve Rolston

We’re a week away from my next public appearance: the Vancouver Comic Arts Festival. This FREE event will be taking place at the Roundhouse Community Centre on May 25th and 26th. This is the show’s second year and it’s shaping up to be a solid gathering of indie comic creators. I’ll be there as a special guest and, in addition to having a table, I’ll be doing a talk at 3pm on the Saturday. I’ll be discussing the basic stages of creating a comic book page. You should come check it out if you’re new to the creative side of the medium and curious about how it all comes together.

And if you want to get directly involved in the event, VanCAF is looking for more volunteers to make sure everything runs smoothly. Check out their website for more info: www.vancaf.com

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Happening even sooner is the next Vancouver Comic Con at Heritage Hall. That’s this Sunday, May 19th and the headline creators are Corey “Reyyy” Lewis, Michael Walsh and Ed Brisson. I won’t be attending as a guest but I wanted to point it out since it’s been a few years since my ol’ pal Corey made it up to Vancouver and I’m sure there are some Sharknife fans out there wanting to see that dude in person. www.vancouvercomiccon.com

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Meanwhile, over at VanArts, we’ve pushed back the start date of my next comic class until June 3rd. This gives all you aspiring comic artists a couple more weeks to sign up for my 12-week course, Introduction to Comic Book Production. It’s looking to be a small class, which means you’ll get plenty of one-on-one time for me to critique your visual storytelling and help improve your art.

Need an endorsement? One of my former students, Anat Rabkin, recently tweeted: “If you’re in the Vancouver area, I cannot recommend @steverolston’s comic course enough. Worth every penny. He’s an awesome teacher.”

Go on, invest in your comic-drawing education! www.vanarts.com/courses/introduction-comic-book-production

Feeling the need to geek out this weekend? You’re in luck because it’s time for Fan Expo Vancouver! The show runs this Saturday and Sunday, April 20-21, and I’ll be there both days. This is Vancouver’s full-size pop culture convention. Lots of stuff for fans of comics, video games, anime, sci-fi, fantasy, horror, Lego, etcetera.

Come on down to the Vancouver Convention Centre and check it all out. Advance tickets have sold out but there will be a limited number of tickets available at the door.

I’ll be set up among the other comic creators, selling some of my books and prints. You can find me at Table P11 in Artists Alley.

If you’re in Vancouver tonight, you should head down to the CARDED! show, buy a pack of trading cards and trade with other people until you get one of mine! That’s right, you can get your very own Steve Rolston trading card!

Check it all out from 8-11pm at the Hot Art Wet City gallery, 2206 Main Street (& 6th Ave). It’s only happening tonight, Saturday, April 6th!

The creators of Hot One Inch Action present CARDED! a one-night only show of art reproduced on trading cards. The work of fifty artists is presented on trading cards and made available for art lovers to collect and trade. These 2.5″x3.5″ cards are displayed on the gallery wall and the audience is offered the opportunity to buy random cards in mixed packs of five for $5. If you purchase a pack that doesn’t have your desired card, get into some fast paced trading action with the people around you. How bad do you want that card!?

Featuring: Miguel Abreu, Fraser Adams, Russell Alton, i Heart, Danielle Borisoff, MW Bowen, Jenn Brisson, Ali Bruce, Paul Antony Carr, Suite Charlie, Tony Cliff, Ben Z Cooper, Brandon Cotter, Dacosta!, DEDOS, Heather Douglas, Carelle B Dunn, Krystian Guevara, Exploding Haggis, Andrea Hooge, Clare Hooper, Serena “Binky” Inman, Lindsay Ishihiro, Kalynn Kallweit, Jackie Klobucar, Framed Fiend (Artem Kuznetsov), Rich Lehl, Justin Longoz, Becky McEachern, Soizick Meister, Josué Menjivar, Jenna Milsom, Hannah Myers, Howard Penning, Nicole Pinkerton, Joel Rich, Steve Rolston, Mika Senda, Jay Senetchko, Kazimir Simpson, Joseph Taormina, Cherry Thompson, Robin Thompson, Amy Tom, Justin Totemical, Mandy Tsung, andyvanoverberghe, Chris von Szombathy, Aaron White, Ben Worth

A few weekends ago I ventured out of my hermit cave and took a little ferry across the water to Granville Island. I walked past the tourists, the public market and the various shops & artisans until I made it to the Emily Carr University of Art + Design. On this particular weekend, one of the Emily Carr theatres had been rented by Schoolism for a gesture drawing workshop. The workshop was being taught by Pixar story artist Louis Gonzales, who has worked on animated films such as The Iron Giant, Monsters Inc, Ratatouille and Brave.

Schoolism is an online art school. I wasn’t too familiar with them prior to this event but they seem to have a nice assortment of courses available where students get video feedback on their work. Some courses also have a Self-Taught version where you don’t get personal critiques but you can work your way through the course material at your own pace.

The school has also been doing some workshops in the real world, which they call Schoolism LIVE. So far, the cities lucky enough to get workshops have been Vancouver, Toronto, Rio de Janeiro, Florianopolis and London. If you live in or near one of these cities, you should keep an eye out for workshops coming your way. I’m definitely grateful I got a heads-up from an old buddy of mine from animation school.

It’s appropriate that he’s the one who turned me onto it since I don’t think I’ve taken a class in anything since I finished animation school back in 1998. And I’ve only rarely been to life drawing sessions since then. The last one was at least a couple years ago. Yes, I’ve been negligent of my artist fundamentals. And yes, life drawing is very good exercise for an illustrator. But in all honesty, while studying and drawing the human figure did give me a better understanding of anatomy, I never got exactly what I needed from life drawing sessions or even the classes I took back in college.

This time around, in Louis Gonzales’ workshop, I think I got what I needed.

The workshop had around a hundred artists in attendance. I knew a handful of them from the local animation and video game industries (hey Justin, Hallis & John!) and I suspect that most of the crowd was also working or studying in those areas. As we entered, each of us was given a pencil, a Schoolism t-shirt and a booklet. The pencil did its job and the t-shirt fit my colour palette but the booklet was obviously the real treasure.

The bulk of the lecture is all laid out in the booklet. I love this approach. I do something similar with my comic book students so they can refer back to the information later without having to rely on memory (which in my case isn’t very reliable at all). So now, whenever I feel my poses getting lame, I’ll be able to pull the booklet down off my shelf and hit myself over the head with it.

Gesture drawing (that is, a 30-second to 2-minute sketch of a human figure) was nothing new for most of us in the crowd. And I’m sure most had experienced at least some classes or tutorials that covered many of the same basic principles. Line of Action, Shape, Silhouette, Space, Exaggeration and Extrapolation were the principles that Louis covered. Plus one more, which he deemed the most important element in all of gesture drawing: Story.

As a visual storyteller, you’d think that one would be obvious to me. Finding the core idea behind the pose and turning that into a story. Of course. I always knew that I needed to approach life drawing in a way that suited my own needs but I never really figured out the key to that. But I feel like the points made in this workshop have brought some clarity to my approach. Both for drawing naked people on a stage and for drawing characters in a comic book.

There’s also a lot to be said for watching a talented artist as they work. And I enjoyed watching Louis draw on top of a few student drawings to show how certain elements could be pushed more to improve the pose or emphasize different ideas.

Looking at the drawings I did during the workshop, I see that they’re terrible examples of what was being taught. They got more on-point as we got further along but I still had so much rust that needed to be shook off. I was still shedding my old approach to life drawing. In particular, I was still focussing too much on exactly what I saw rather than focussing on the idea behind the pose. I can see the appeal of taking one of the 12-week courses online so you have more time to shake off that rust and get feedback along the way.

Like I said, some of the stuff I learned (or re-learned) should be obvious. But I’m not perfect. I can’t figure everything out on my own nor remember everything when I need it. In fact, I’m thinking of setting a reminder for myself to go through this booklet once a month so it stays fresh in my mind as I’m drawing.

I should point out that the booklet and workshop were developed by both Louis Gonzales and Alex Woo, another Pixar story artist who also teaches gesture drawing at Schoolism.

Oh, and Autodesk sponsored the workshop, which meant the nice bonus of Schoolism’s Bobby Chui handing out copies of Sketchbook Pro 6 on their behalf. So thanks to them for that.

And an even bigger thanks to my girlfriend, who bought me the workshop ticket as a gift!

Louis Gonzales: louzales.tumblr.com
Alex Woo: www.woohoopictures.com
Schoolism: www.schoolism.com

Pssst, if you decide to take any Schoolism courses, this code should get you a discount: q0vt6

After years of dragging my feet, I’ve finally relaunched my website! The last version of this site was sloppily coded by myself way back in 2003. Ten years ago! Yeesh! And since I’ve barely learned anything new about website design in the past decade, my talented girlfriend Noble Beast has been lending her formidable skills to the task. We’re still working out the kinks and will be adding more fanciness and content in the near future but I wanted to launch it on my birthday… so Happy Birthday to ME!

As you can see, we’ve integrated my blog directly into the website (good riddance, LiveJournal) and you can subscribe to an RSS feed of these posts. The rest of the site is also much easier to update, so I’ll be able to keep the content more current than I used to.

I’m also decommissioning my old Yahoo mailing list and replacing it with a shiny new one via MailChimp. To get these infrequent updates about new releases, convention appearances or other exciting news, go to the bottom of any page on my website and sign up!

Thanks for stopping by. I hope you keep coming back!