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SPLENDID-LITE TRAILER

Here's a teaser for my forthcoming book, SPLENDID-LITE. For more images be sure to visit my website at kenhensonart.com

Thank you, Jim Davis.

Like many other artists I know, the encouragement I received from my friends, parents, and teachers helped foster my enthusiasm. It's this kind of encouragement that led me to become a teacher. One profound inspiration was Jim Davis. When I was in the third grade I wrote Mr. Davis, and he was kind enough to write me back. I had never written a celebrity before and did not know whether he would write me back or not. I remember feeling absolutely graced when I received the following hand typed letter with Mr. Davis' signature. Keep in mind this was 1983 and Garfield had only been around for five years.

Thank you, Mr. Davis. Thank you for your kind inspiration to a budding artist. :)

Enclosed was a photocopy of an article and a promotional. The following are pics of the letter and the promotional, which I think is a nifty little piece of ephemera.

A Bit of Process

Creating mixed media work always provokes questions like "What am I looking at?" and "How did you make this?" I ask these questions too, and one of my favorite questions to ask someone is "Why did you make that decision?", which gets to the meaning behind the method. Without going into a technical tutorial, I'm going to show you some of the materials and strategies I use with an emphasis on the storytelling effects I'm going for with my handling of media. Hope this gives a glimpse into my process.

My main point in this post is that I like my environments to reflect the psychology of my characters--as though what we are seeing is through the eyes and emotions of the characters. Some level of abstraction is necessary to attain this. Image has to depart from the real in order to become metaphorical. It's amazing how we can pick up on this unconsciously and how it guides our experience.



Above is a typical page from Splendid-Lite. It has multiple panels and in terms of materials is all over the map. The first panel is hand drawn and painted with dry and wet media, but the image on the screen was a picture of a painting on canvas that was added in photoshop. The blue mist was done in watercolor, but was also added later. I do this kind of thing a lot. Sometimes the atmosphere is a drawn or splatter-painted element and sometimes it's photographic.

Here is a glimpse of the same area of the page but with the dominant panel removed:



The second and third panels are a fusion of mixed media figure drawings with photos of a miniature model drive-in movie set that I constructed in my studio. The images on the screens are slides of paintings that were projected onto a vintage, portable, movie screen, which is playing the role of the drive-in screen. This washed out the images in a believable way, like the photos were shot at a real drive-in. The idea is to balance aspects of the real with the artificial.

Below is an unaffected pic of the drive in set. The lighting is high contrast and dramatic. The concession signage is backwards because it was made of old time, printing press blocks. In the final images, I affected the backgrounds with lens blur filters in pshop because, while I want the setting to have a nice ersatz feel, I wanted it to have a bit of mystery. I mean look at those toy cars. They look like....well....they look like toy cars. While I want them to feel a bit artificial in the final image, and perhaps even look like toy cars upon close scrutiny, I don't want them to shout "Hey! I'm a toy car!"

David Mack Workshop

To give you a little back-story, my buddy Matt Wright and I have been giving cartooning workshops for  various branches of The Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County.  We do two kinds of workshops: 

1. a 90 minute workshop, which we've done for 16 different branch locations

2. a multi session workshop, lasting 6 to 8 weeks, with 2 hour sessions a week

The library taps some amazing grants, which enable us to bring in guest artists and to outfit the kids with amazing materials.  Imagine being a teen and getting a free 8 week cartooning course, at the end of which you receive a professional, black, soft portfolio, 24 blue line pro-art boards, a mechanical pencil, a pack of leads, a mechanical eraser, a copy of Making Comics (Scott McCloud), a copy of a graphic novel of your choice, copies of  a professionally printed comic book with your art in it, your friends' art in it, and a new drawing by David Mack in it.  Pretty sweet.  

Beyond the free materials, one of the things that make these workshops so special is the small size of the group--15 kids--which means that they get great interaction with Matt, myself, and our visiting artists.

The photos below are from a 2007 workshop with David Mack.  I have another one set up with him soon, and I'll post pics from that one when available.  David's a great guy to have at a workshop.  He's a very open and friendly speaker, eager to share his process and answer any questions people might have.  We've had David give lectures at The Art Academy too, and that's always been a great experience.

Blogger crops the pics, so click them to see the whole thing.

Here's David (left) with his brother, Steven, another friendly guy who did some great drawings at our workshop.

Here's a shot of the materials David brought with him.  Ton's of original boards.

A shot of the kids hard at work on their comic.

Yours truly working with the kids.

A drawing David did of the kids.

The cover of the comic the library produced in conjunction with this workshop.  It has work from all the kids, the Mack drawing above, my work, Matt's work, and the work of the other two visiting artists, Mark O'Neill, and Matt Parmenter.