Ross Campbell is easily one of the most visually distinct artists working in mainstream comics today. Once you've seen his work, it's hard to confuse him with anyone else. He's been quietly over the last few years creating some of the best looking comics on the stands. I first came across his work through his Oni Press book Wet Moon and have been following him since. I talked to Ross about his approach to craft since with his recent project Shadoweyes (available from Slave Labor Graphics), he switched from using wet media to using digital media for his book. I thought it would be interesting to pick his brain about his craft and tools.
His website is http://www.greenoblivion.com/ and he has a highly entertaining and informative blog located at http://mooncalfe.livejournal.com
Above art from Shadoweyes
All art in this article is copyright Ross Campbell and used with persmission of the artist
Comics Connections: Can you tell a little about yourself and the books that you've worked on?
Ross Campbell: My name is Ross, I was born and raised in Rochester, New York, and right now I'm a full-time freelance artist/creator. I got my start in comics working on "Hopeless Savages" volume 3, published by Oni Press, but my first big graphic novel-length book was "Spooked," written by Antony Johnston, about a gothy artist girl who has ghosts living in her head. After that I started my "Wet Moon" series, currently on its 5th volume, which features a group of sort of punky gothy alterna-kids in art college and is about relationships, drama, ambiguous supernatural goings-on, a masked crimefighter and a serial killer on campus, with a little bit of politics. After I did Wet Moon volume 1 I did a zombie book called "The Abandoned" for Tokyopop, which took place in a similar Southern US setting like Wet Moon is set in, and features punky redneck characters dealing with a zombie phenomenon in which everyone over the age of 22 becomes a zombie. It was supposed to be 3 books long but the publisher declined to continue it, so the series still remains in limbo since Tokyopop owns half the rights. I also did a book for DC Comics' Minx line called "Water Baby," about surfer girls, a shark attack, an annoying ex-boyfriend, and a road trip in another Southern setting (which was actually a crossover with Wet Moon), which was fun to do but the book itself is kind of a mess, mostly because I tended to draw the characters too sexy, and I don't really look upon it fondly. Water Baby is another case of me intending there to be a second book but never getting to do it. My newest book is called "Shadoweyes," a teenage vigilante superhero story, which is set in the opposite of the American South: a dystopian futuristic city in the middle of a desert wasteland! Other than my main projects, I've done a few fill-in/inset stories for various comics like Vertigo's "House of Mystery" series and "Hack/Slash," and little self-publishing: a comic called "Mountain Girl" which is about a hugely-muscled mystic cannibal warrior girl named Naga in a magical ice age of bombastic gods and battle.
CC: What tools do you use to make comics?
Campbell: Different tools depending on the book, which can include pencil, sumi ink with a brush, markers, ink wash, and Photoshop for greytones and level adjustment and that sort of thing, and various combinations of those things. I've done fully-traditional comics with markers and ink wash, to half-and-half traditionally-drawn comics with digital greytones/colors, to completely digital. I used to ink all my comics but I've abandoned that except for short stories, because of hand pain, and now my primary traditional method is plain pencil. Lately I've been doing digital comics straight in Photoshop which I really enjoy, although even for those I still do the thumbnails in pencil. And for paper I like to use the smooth surface Strathmore Bristol, but if the store is sold out of that the vellum surface is okay too.
CC: What is your working process like in completing a page both on paper and digitally?
Campbell: Both ways are basically the same. I'll almost always have a script first, then I thumbnail in pencil, then I scan the thumbnails into the computer once they're all done (I don't work page by page, I do each step in its entirety before moving on). If I'm drawing traditionally I'll print out each thumbnail on its own sheet of paper, then go to Kinko's and blow them up even bigger to about 9x12 or so (I used to work a lot bigger but kinda small nowadays), then use a lightbox to trace over the thumbnail onto the bristol paper. Or if I'm drawing digitally, I stop after the scanning step, I just draw over the thumbnail (on a different layer of course) right in Photoshop.
CC: When you're working on paper, do you have very tight pencils or do you work very loosely?
Campbell: It depends on if I'm going to be inking the artwork or not, but I think in general my pencils are fairly tight, though obviously way more tight if they're not going to be inked since in that case the pencils are the final linework.
CC: When you're working with ink, what do you usually do to warm up?
Campbell: Nothing really, I usually prefer to jump right in.
CC: What prompted you to start working digitally? Can you talk a little about the pros and cons of working in a paperless medium?
Campbell: I originally got a wacom tablet only for doing word balloons, I never expected, or wanted, to ever do any actual drawing with it. But that didn't happen and I found myself starting to do little sketches at first, but the big push came when I was doing sketches for my Shadoweyes book. Way back when, I originally had teamed up with another artist to draw Shadoweyes, Michelle Silva, whose preliminary work for the project was done digitally and it was really raw and rough and perfect for the book, and I was so inspired by it that I had to try my hand at it, and it ended up being super fun and refreshing and much easier on my tendonitis-ridden drawing arm, it was like a blast of fresh air. This also came at a time when I was getting bored and frustrated with my regular tools and my angle on drawing, I needed a new approach but I couldn't figure out how to do it, so when I started using the tablet it felt like what I'd been looking for. I'm usually a tight-ass when I draw, I'm really meticulous and particular and I get all tensed up and it's not pleasant. As the years went by I got more and more tense and tight and I couldn't force myself to loosen up, but when I got into digital drawing, it FORCED me to loosen up because I wasn't very good at it, it was like learning how to draw all over again, I loved it. I could do a loose, sketchy digital drawing and go "this is done" and be finished with it and commit to it and put it up online, it was very liberating for me.
From Wet Moon vol. 2Another con for digital is that you don't get the original pages to sell, although I've never been able to sell that many so that's not much of a problem for me. And speaking of original art, another digital pro is the space: I'm not left with piles of paper cluttering up my closet, I can take my laptop and tablet anywhere and work, and it also uses less resources and money and saves a couple trees or whatever.
It seems like I'm making digital out to be mostly pros, but the biggest con I guess would be just the "look" of it. There are many artists who have fancier programs than I do, I'm still farting along with Photoshop 6, and much better skills or equipment than I do, artists who are able to do drawings and paintings that look near indistinguishable from traditional media, but my digital stuff LOOKS digital, at least to me, it looks like I'm slopping around with the circle pencil tool in Photoshop. On one hand I like that, if I'm working digitally I want it to look like what it is, if I wanted a book to have an inky/pencily/whatever look, I'd just draw the thing traditionally. But since I'm not able to get a wide variety of looks since I'm always just using the crappy pencil tool in Photoshop 6 with my old discontinued tablet model, digital art's application also seems more narrow to me. I've been toying with drawing my next Wet Moon book digitally and I did some good stuff with it where it looks really different than my work on Shadoweyes or my usual sketchy digital stuff, and I tightened up the linework and everything, but it's just not the same. I don't have the capability right now to ape traditional media very well, at least until I get a new program (but who's got the money for that?!) or get better at it.
CC: One thing that I love about your digital work, is that you don't try to make your linework look clean. Is this done as a conscious effort to make the page more organic? How do you get this effect
Campbell: Maybe I kind of already answered this, but it's both. I'm still not very good with the tablet, at least not as good as I am with pencil or ink in terms of control, so a lot of the looseness is me doing the best I can. I can feel myself getting more control and getting tighter with it as time progresses, but I think the looseness and roughness is just the way the tablet drawing "feels" to me, it feels like it should be rough and that's how it comes out. So I guess it's half and half, half conscious, half incidental.
CC: How much of inking is a conscious active versus a very instinctive one for you, both on paper and digitally?
Campbell: It's way more conscious on paper, I don't think I'm instinctive inker at all, which is a good way of alternately stating what I was talking about before, about me being a tight-ass with brush inking but being able to loosen up with the tablet. I think the tablet is more instinctive for me, while when I ink on paper I tend to really focus consciously on it. Although sometimes when I ink on paper I get into a sort of zen-like calm state where even though my body is still tensed up, mentally I'm just "there" and I'm moving sort of instinctively. So maybe it's basically the same for both, conscious vs. instinct, just in different ways. That was probably the most uninformative answer I've given yet, ha.
CC: What advice do you have for cartoonist regarding both inking and using digital media?
Campbell: Try everything out and see what you like before making a call, and even then be open to changing your mind later on. Don't fall into the trap of thinking one is better or more "acceptable" than the other or that traditional art is more "real art" than digital; I see a lot of people acting disparagingly elitist toward digital art/artists, like if you do something digitally it's automatically less impressive or valid than if you had done it traditionally, which I think is baloney and it's fine to have personal preferences, obviously, but once people start boxing artwork in based on process rather than quality of expression or whatever, it only serves to put limitations or boundaries or prejudices where there shouldn't be any.
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