Kim Ku / Inverted Love

Been working hard at another silkscreen book called Hi Neighbor!.

My idea started off as a tiny mockup that I drew on the train:

Measures less than an inch tall

Then, after a few more mockups and a few weeks of printing, Hi Neighbor became real.

The full version on nice archival paper

I chose this book format because it fit the content (slanty buildings) and also because it was easy to make. Just fold a rectangular sheet of paper into eight sections (4 columns by 2 rows) and then cut 2 quarters in the middle divide. That sounds complicated, but trust me, it’s not.

You can get an idea of how it's made from this picture

Look inside and there’s a little surprise — blueprints of everyone’s apartment!

A lot of easter eggs on this side

I only made 16 of these– 1 of which I accidentally cut incorrectly, which found a home in my sister’s collection, leaving me 15 good ones.

Comics soon!

For the past few weeks I’ve been printing, cutting and gluing together Smell Book, a little step accordion book about a little guy who’s smelling about town.

The cover

The hardest part about printing this was making sure the smells lined up when I folded up the accordion. Of the 50 I made, 5 of them were defective. Don’t cry for them though, those 5 will find good homes with forgiving friends and family.

Open sesame!

I tried to connect the smell scenes together either by color changes or connecting lines. I’ve come to realize that I love making accordion books– depending on how you design them, they can be separate narratives or one long continuing one.

A little close up

It took about 3 weeks to get this done. For every 3 hours of studio time, I can usually print 2 (3, if I’m lucky) of colors at a time. Cutting and gluing is the easiest part since I can do those from home.

More books to come!

Smell Book is the newest short narrative I’m working on. As always, my books start with a mockup like this:

When opening the book, you’ll see what he’s actually smelling. These are definitely some of my most favorite smells to date!

I should have taken a picture of each color layer I made but alas, my memory failed. Here’s the print so far 4 colors in. There’s one layer left– the best layer– the smell layer!

I’ll update again soon with my results when I print at the end of the week.

Alexandra Bequez, Alden Viguilla, Estrella Vega  and I decided to put together an anthology comic under the name of Three Armed Squid. There are 4 of us so we decided that the first issue would be each of us making a four page comic themed around items that come in sets of 4. We thought about it for a while and finally agreed on making comics about the four seasons.

My sketches started in a little notepad I carried with me on my subway ride to Flushing:

And now it’s become this…

This one’s been tentatively named “A Pumpin’ Halloween” and will be released along with all the other comics in the anthology next year at Mocca!

EXCITEMENT.

P.S. Can you guess which season I got?

Inspired by the game started by Matt Madden and Tom Hart, Alexandra Beguez and I decided to play the Tic Tac Toe comic game for ourselves. How do you play? Let me explain!

1. Find an appropriate location– preferably a relaxed, uncrowded place with food and drink to keep up your energy and spirits. We chose the Schnippers on 23rd street where we enjoyed milkshakes, chicken fingers and homemade potato chips.
2. Bring an arsenal of paper, pens, pencils and erasers. Here’s our setup:
   

   Any pad is fine. Mine was 8.5 x 11 and Alex's was 11 x 17

3. Draw a 3 by 3 grid on 2 pieces of paper. Don’t worry if your boxes are uneven (mine definitely were).
4. (Optional) Choose a theme for each tic tac toe comic. My theme was “creepy” and Alex’s was “science fiction.”
5. The person who plays the X on one sheet of paper plays the O on the other. Each play you make has to have relevance to an X or O, whether it be making the shape of the letters in the panel or using X or O words in the speech bubbles.
6. Now you’re ready to draw! Start the comic from wherever you’d play your first move in tic tac toe–  if you start at the center box, you start the comic in the middle of the story. The next person plays their next move by placing their panel wherever they’d want to go next, and so on and so forth till you finish the game. The object is to win, but you can also just play by drawing the panels you want to draw.
   

   Mid-game: I started in the center. In this game, you can tell the X or O by the speech bubbles.

   

   Mid game: Alex started on the upper right. This comic was wordless so we had to make X's and O's in the drawing.

7. If there’s a non-win, which we both had, then the rule is to draw an OX in the last drawn panel. (Get it? O and X?)
8. The game takes hours so set aside some time. We moved locations midday because Schnippers closed so we finished our final panel and then inked the comic at a nearby cafe. Here are our final results!
   

   I was O. Alex was X.

   

   I was X. Alex was O.

MIA– drawing always makes me MIA. I’m having too much fun drawing the final pencils (they’re my favorite part) that I lose track of the blog… but not today!

If I had to rank from my favorite parts of making comics to my least favorite, it’d be like this:

1. Penciling
2. Inking
3. Script
4. Thumbnails
5. Revised Thumbnails
6. Revised Revised Thumbnails (it doesn’t always need this)

Ugh, revised thumbnails feels like busy work but I know it’s necessary.

This is what I’ve been doing. Turning these dreaded revised thumbnails:

Into:

That’s right. My thumbnails are pretty much stick figures depending on how lazy I am. It’s the idea that counts right? As I’m penciling more, I’ll update more here!

Here’s how I ink my panels. Still trucking.

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1. Outline the boxes. Contain the mess.

2. Write the text with a rapidograph. Using the brush pen could lead to uneven lettering.

3. Use the brush pen to make the speech bubble. Give the text enough room to breathe. Badly fitted text is the worst.

4. This part is my favorite. I get to take flat pencil lines and give them some weight.

5. The dry brush pen was good for the trees-- different textures!

6. Erasing is usually the most boring part... but it's the end. At least for this panel

Sorry for my delay all! Without further ado, here’s part 2!

To recap, here’s a closeup of one of the jellyfish transparencies.

After you make transparencies, you have to actually screen print your book which is long and painful but really rewarding if you get it right. It takes a while to explain how to do it so I’ll keep it simple. When you screen print, you separate each color you’re using onto their own screens. Then, one by one,  you print each color onto a nice piece of paper, starting from the lightest to the darkest color. That process takes a while, but it’s kind of beautiful, because your image starts to appear slowly like waiting for a Polaroid picture to finish exposing.

I decided to print on 3 different types of paper.

1. Iyo Glazed rice paper
2. Rives BFK Cream
3. Rives BFK Gray

Here’s a closeup of the Iyo Glazed, which I thought came out the best. Out of all the paper, this gave me the best looking texture.

And here’s a closeup of the BFK Rives Cream paper:

After everything was printed, the next step was the cut and fold the paper. My ruler, xacto knife and bone folder spent many hours bonding over this book.

Here’s a close up of the intestines.

And here is the final fold out. I haven’t glued the pages together, made a cover, or decided how big my run will be(how many copies that will turn out well), so there’s still a lot more to do… but so far, I’m really happy with how it came out!

So it’s not over. I’ll be back to show you the completed book!

I’ve been having a lot of fun working on my last accordion book for my screenprinting/book making class so I thought I’d share with you my process in making it.

Shall we start at the beginning? An idea can sometimes start with something as stupid as this:

A glass of water and someone throwing up

Hm, that was an interesting start but kind of weird. The water reminded me of the jellyfish I drew a lot of recently so maybe I’ll start from there? How can I make that work into a book? When I made the coffee book, I thought it looked nice but it lacked any kind of narrative which made it a little boring. So after a while, I came up with this:

Jellyfish inside a whale.... jellyfish being eaten by a whale! A HA!

A book about being eaten by a whale. Jellyfish like that can be easily mistaken for plankton?

An interesting idea isn’t enough. After I get a concept, I spent a long time fleshing out the details. Everything from how the jellyfish would gather on their way into the whale’s mouth, the position of the whale’s eyes, how the book would eventually look slightly folded open, etc, are all small but important details to me.

The devil is in the details, right?

After I sketch enough, I start making the transparencies for screen printing. Some people draw their images on paper with a pencil first and then draw their images onto transparencies with a pen but I decided to skip the step and just wing it and start with the pen on the transparencies. Sometimes it’s more fun to just deal with the consequences.

The first 2 panels

The last 2 panels

I made a bunch of other layers too… in screenprinting, each color needs its own transparency…. oh man, this is a long process. I’ll continue this in my next entry!

A lot of my friends are selling their wares at MOCCA this weekend and I’ll be sure to stop by their booths to make them sketch things for me. And yay!.. they’ve been nice enough to sell part one of Hearts & Holes and my coffee books for me.

Here’re some process pics of how I made the Hearts & Holes cover:

I made my own stamp using some soft linoleum and old tools and stamped all of my books by hand. Each heart is unique– just as they are in real life.

Here’s the freshly printed stamp. Up close, it just looks like a weird jigsaw puzzle.

Here’s the inside. The comic pages are printed on a wallet-breaking 32lb semi-gloss white ream of paper… no xerox paper for me!

I went through a lot of iterations of the cover/book pages/printing methods before I settled on this one. If you go, take a looksee… if you can find it.