Bim Bam Boom LP Cover WIP (New Revisions/Process)

Some jobs linger unexpectedly.

Above; My initial layout for the Bim Skala Bim covers comp art. After initial approval, the label guy was very concerned people would read the title as "Bam-Bim-Boom" rather than "Bim-Bam-Boom". I showed it to people who read it from top down. he showed it to people and a few read it from left, then up, then right. I'm fine with revising it only I don't love the 'tic-tac-toe" order asked for. But it's the best way to go to get things done. I'm really happy to do this cover, but the pay is low for 90s indy label rates. I'm doing this out of love and wanting to help, but I am not in the same position I was in during the 90s (almost no debt, discretionary income, low responsibility, full of energy and hope for the future, etc).

So, after finishing the art, Sarah drops the elements into the revised panel layout:

And we both agree the dancing figures look like crap in the sixth panel. They were designed expressly to go in the dead center panel. Also, before the revision, to save some time -- and, to be honest, make things easier to read in the middle panel -- I dropped the background crowd and the dancing shoes in the foreground (the latter a nod to the Dance Craze album from the Two-Tone era. Btw, the Dance Craze movie has been restored and is being re-released. It looks amazing, especially if, like me, you only ever saw it on a crap bootleg VHS tape).

Sarah tried breaking the extended crowd image (panel 3) into two sections to replace panel six with something that would balance things out better.

Which looks better but goes in too close on the figures in the crowd.

So I needed to extend the crowd drawing (below) further and then Sarah could split it for panels 3 and 6, with more room for playing around with size and placement.

So on Wednesday I jumped on the board and put together a layout for the crowd extension (on tracing paper):

I penciled the crowd onto board and tried to ink it as quickly as I could because I am currently late on a 4-page paying comics gig. April was terrible, money-wise, and March wasn't much better, so I'm already in a bit of a panic as this low-pay gig has already cost us money, and I spent time on another WFMU charity drawing before starting this (I know, I should have declined it with everything such a mess, my fault).

I was feeling good about it because the pencils laid in nicely and fairly quickly. But my inking hand was not willing to behave:

The paper sucked, I was rushing, my hand was giving me problems and trying to connect elements from the extension to the original inked crowd wasn't jibing well. The original crowd was not drawn to be added to. It went beyond the panel to give room to move it around for the best positioning. I had thrown in some extra textures and "dummy" crowd members to cover the edges. Trying to get one figure to connect to an outstretched arm (see inked crowd and rough crowd 2 layout for guy sticking his arm out)  was not working out smoothly, another figure who I'd drawn half of in the crowd was a pain to complete.

I trashed the mess (you can see how many figures I covered in white correction ink, via a Pentel jumbo correction pen) and started over. And it was still giving me problems.  So I just gave up on extending the image and started working out a separate crowd (going into what would become a 31 hour day):

The finished "crowd 2". Some figures and faces got revised or changed to help me get it done, and balance the black areas as best as I could. I was in panic mode and stayed up close to 24 hours to finish it up (I ended up staying awake 31 hours total, from Thursday into Friday). The monkey was added because I was getting tired, bored and upset and needed to cheer myself up. He won't even be in the panel, I couldn't find a "good" spot for him closer in. The big angry doofus all busted up in the upper right was originally going to be a werewolf duded but I didn't like how it looked and realized he's not going to be seen in the finished album cover, either, so just wing it. The unhappy guy looking at him is the only character I inked quickly and in simple lines that I didn't embellish or mess with, took thirty seconds, tops, because I didn't care -- he wasn't going to appear. It looks good. Simple, non-fussy cartooning. I have to remember to do that more often. Every other character has corrections and thickened lines and textures and some of them looked better before I messed around with them.

Anyway, I got the new panel done. I was in no shape to work Saturday. Today I was asked to do a quick promo piece for something. No pressure, but I'm going to try to do it to help out. I have to get it done by tonight. Trying to adopt a mindset of "Get it done, do a good job, don't go crazy". Here's to hoping.

Oh, here's a bonus fuck up panel, below. The only one I fudged badly enough to redo. Too much correction ink to continue with, and I didn't feel like taking a razor blade to scrape the layers and start over because I hated working on this 4-ply Bristol I got at Michael's near my therapist. Too rough a surface, and hard to erase, and layouts smeared pencil and colored pencil across it if it just kissed the surface. It was the best they had when I needed paper immediately, unfortunately (Staten Island sucks for art supplies. Among other things). I had a cut scrap of Bristol that was decent and large enough to redo the image.

Hopefully there's no more drawing to be done for this and it's good to go for assembly and colors.

Whew.