When you look at a cartoon, see an advertisement in a magazine, or are merely bumbling through the internet’s endless stream of photos, you must remember that someone made that. Someone spent time and energy to create that graphic or image. Likewise, we must remember who creates pinups, as they are a large part of art’s history and it’s future.

For some, sexually appealing images have a value that is multifascited and helps to explain our world as well as the people in it. For others, it’s something to simply gawk at. The bottom line for most artists, however, is will sell and help me to survive? Well, as you may have guessed, sex does, in fact, sell, and artists are finding new ways to convey it. Laurie B is one such artist.

Laurie is able to mix cute with sexy, whether with different characters in the same panel or even with a single character. From the information I can find online about her, she must be a fairly modest person, not wanting to flaunt her personality or work, too much. Her humility, however, will not be on display here as I fully intend to showcase a few of her pieces. Here’s a sample of her “about me” from ArtofLaurieB.com:

Once upon a time, Disney aired a documentary about Feature Animation. I was shocked to discover that Goofy was not a real actor in some 2-dimensional world too expensive for our family to travel to on summer vacation. Still, I watched in awe as the animators flipped pages at their desk and made their drawings move. Sheer magic. It was at that moment that I knew I wanted to be an animator. I was 12 years old.

I always loved to draw, and have been drawing for longer than I can remember, but growing up on a farm in Alberta, Canada, I was a long way off from my career goals. There wasn’t anyone I could ask about it or job shadow for a day, no books at the library, and certainly no studios even remotely close by. I owned a single animated film on VHS – a copy of Disney’s Robin Hood – so I began there, freeze-framing through it all, and filling my sketchbook.

After I finished high school I began searching more aggressively for a career in the animation industry…

I currently work from home, freelancing on both industry and independent properties as well as traveling the convention circuit. We continue to call Calgary home.

Massively talented writer of various Marvel comic books and urban fantasy novels, Marjorie Liu, recently posted this short litany of writing advice she finds helpful to remind herself from time to time: Get to the point. Get back to basics. Do it with a little pizazz. Don’t lose your edge.

It’s pretty much self explanatory, but why should I let that stop me from explaining it? Okay, not really explaining it, but I thought it would be fun to break it down to its four component parts and examine what I have been able to glean from it so far.

Let’s proceed, shall we?

1) Get to the point.

In other words, quit dicking around by showing off your stellar wit and finely crafted prose and get the story told, with expedience, clarity and honesty. I’m sure we’re as impressed as you are with your artistic turn of phrase and your intricate and poetic word constructions, but those don’t mean a thing if you don’t get the story told.

Orson Scott Card, one of the finest writers in our field, takes writing advice questions on his blog, fielding one from a fellow who was worried about his writing style, and complained his inability to refine his own style was causing serious blockages to getting his novel written. I deeply paraphrased the question and now I’ll do the same with the answer. Card replied that it was a silly distraction to worry about style. Just tell the story as simply as possible. Do that and your style will be whatever comes out of just telling the story.

I mentioned that exchange because, whether it helped that fellow or not, it was a Damascus Road experience for me. The scales fell off of my eyes at the simplicity and obviousness of the advice. I had been struggling to learn prose writing, was finding it difficult, next to impossible, and was about ready to pack it in and stick with comic book writing for the rest of my career. And then Card said that, and it made sense. It was actually a freeing moment, in which a ton of metaphorical weights seemed to drop right off of me.

Don’t worry about theme, or style, or any other extraneous nonsense, and just tell a clear story. Let your readers eventually decide those other matters. And, if you run into trouble between two wonderfully crafted scenes that need to be connected, just write the minimum material you need to do that, almost like notes to yourself on what needs to happen, and that should remove the blockage. Later on you may find that it’s the simple terse connecting material that is the better stuff and those two artfully constructed passages are what needs to go, or at least be slimmed down.

2) Get back to basics.

I see this as, “don’t try to reinvent the wheel.” The stuff of good story isn’t going to change. Trying to do something that’s never been done before, such as writing a novel that’s simply one run-on sentence, or purposely constructing indecipherable passages to “challenge” the reader, or any of a vast number of so-called new literary conventions, are all hooey. At best they’re stunts. At worst they’re purposely malicious. My job is to communicate an interesting story to my readers, and communication can only occur when the reader knows what the hell I’m saying.

3) Do it with a little pizazz.

When Marjorie first posted this, fellow Clockworkian Chris Roberson mistook it as: “Do it with a little pizza,” and said as much, which put pizza in the minds of many of those of us who read the small exchange. I wonder how much pizza was ordered that night as a result of the misunderstanding? I know they got me, and my editor at IDW.

But tastiness aside, pizza is not required to write well. In fact it may be an impediment, if you like to keep a clean keyboard.

Here’s how I think Marjorie’s third rule applies to me. It’s not a repudiation of what I just wrote above about ignoring style. We still ought not to worry about our writing style, because that can only grow organically from our actual writing. I think it has something to do with confidence — as in we should have some. Do it with a bit of a swagger.

Humility is all well and good, and a character trait much to be admired. But it has limited use to a writer. If I don’t have enough ego and confidence to believe I have an interesting story to tell, then why am I wasting everyone’s time by jumping up on the metaphorical stage and shouting, “Give me your money, your time and your attention for as long as I want it, because I have a great story to tell you!” That is an act of bravado bordering on arrogance.

This business isn’t for the timid. Writing is an act of leadership, and no one follows an overly timid leader. When you write, bring your swagger. Bring your confidence. Bring your pizazz.

4) Don’t lose your edge.

I’ve lost my edge before. Hell, I’ve lost the whole damned blade. I think the only way to keep your edge is to keep honing it. Keep writing or your tools get dull and useless. If I go a few days without writing it’s like I’m starting all over again when I start up again. Ultimately writing means sitting alone in a room getting hours of work done one day, and then repeating it the next day and so on, for far too many days in a row. If you can’t stand to be alone with yourself in a room for protracted lengths of time, then you can’t do this. You will all too quickly lose your edge.

That’s what I take, so far, from Marjorie’s four admonitions. I know as I ponder further I’ll get other wisdoms from them. That’s the nature of good advice. I wonder what the other Clockwork boys take from the same four rules. Maybe they’ll share as much in their own posts.

For those who want to go to the source, or maybe find out for yourselves why we’re Marjorie Liu fans here at the Clockworks, you can find her and her books here.

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[-] ARTICLE AUTHORS: [-]

Clockwork Storybook is an ongoing discussion about the art, craft, mechanics and absolute human necessity of storytelling. It’s about whatever interests us, the things we like to argue about, the things we feel worth crowing about, and certain other items we think you might find enlightening and interesting.

It is also a group of five professional writers of fiction, biography, comic books, novels and such. In alphabetical order we are:

Mark Finn. He’s an award winning Robert E Howard scholar, author and playwright. His latest book, Blood and Thunder: the Life and Art of Robert E Howard, is available on Amazon.com, along with other REH-related books to which he’s contributed introductions, essays and stories. He also writes fiction, comic books, and the occasional book or movie review.

Chris Roberson. He’s published some three dozen short stories and more than a dozen novels, including the Celestial Empire series (The Dragon’s Nine Sons, Three Unbroken, and Iron Jaw and Hummingbird) and the Bonaventure-Carmody sequence (Here, There & Everywhere, Paragea: A Planetary Romance, Set the Seas on Fire, and End of the Century) and he is scripting the forthcoming Vertigo miniseries Cinderella: From Fabletown with Love, and the ongoing series iZombie. Along with his business partner and spouse Allison Baker, he is the publisher of Monkey Brain Books, an independent publishing house specializing in genre fiction and nonfiction genre studies.

Matthew Sturges. He’s written several books for DC Comics, including House of Mystery, Salvation Run, Blue Beetle, and the Eisner-nominated Jack of Fables (with Bill Willingham). He has also written a novel, Midwinter, available from Pyr. He lives in Austin, Texas with his wife and two daughters.

Bill Williams is the publisher of Lone Star Press which produced many comic books, including Pantheon, for which he was also one of the artists. He’s written comic books for DC Comics and stories in the forthcoming Angel comic book series from IDW. You can find prose books by him such as Tokyo Pop and Other Quinn Stories on Amazon.com.

Bill Willingham. He’s written a ton of funnybooks, including just about every DC Comics character. He’s created several comic book series, including Elementals, Pantheon and the multiple award winning (and multiple award losing) Fables. His first major novel, Peter and Max was released recently.

I think is it is pretty common feature now on igeektrooper to spotlight the work of some very talented artists. This this around, it is my turn and I wanted to feature an artist I have been following for couple years now. Known as belldandies (aka. adi.s.) on DeviantArt, belldandies is a brilliant graphic arts who work features vector-style graphics with simple (but deep) color schemes. Unfortunately, even after hours and hours of searching, there is very information about who belldandies actually is. Other than the fact that he resides in San Francisco, the rest is pretty much a mystery. Some of the most popular work he has done is based on comic and sci-fiction characters. He has given characters such as G.I. Joe’s Baroness, X-Men’s Jean Grey and Storm, and Dave Steven’s The Rocketeer the “belldandies” treatment. belldandies’ vector art style is beautifully elegant and haunting while his meticulous use of various levels of red and black gives the art a vibrant personality. If the world was flat, belldandies would be king.

I know that dvenzo, like me, probably loves every last piece belldandies has posted, and has trouble not reposting the gallery in its entirety. Nevertheless, here are a few selected pieces from belldandies’s gallery:

Dvenzo also added that “If anyone has more info on belldandies, please drop me an email to dvenzo@igeektrooper.com so I can provide more info about the artist!” I’m sure we’d all like to know more!

In any case, I’m glad I’ve finally exposed myself to the various mass of pwntastic and laughable awful that exists inside the slightly grunged and emo looking website. I mean, the amount of content existing there is vast and without end. I would, most likely, be able to go on endlessly about the absolute best and worst that I happen to come across there. So, while I am now contemplating an “Awful Artists” series of posts (and it keeps sounding better the more I think about it), I really need to spill the beans on today’s Awesome Artist, Ming Doyle.

Looking over her available portfolio, I’ve noticed she does great line work and is able to work in multiple styles. I enjoy her work on The Loneliest Astronauts, where her style is similar to what you might see in a NY Times political cartoon. Her personal style uses lines as expression, rather than letting the color do all the work, and in yet another style, Ming is able to find a gracious balance between reality and the line styles typical of modern graphic novels to evoke new emotions with familiar characters. She’s definitely been refining her skills and is, now, growing in demand (she recently did a huge chucnk of work on the Jennifer’s Body graphic novel), but even though she has a bit of a fan following, she’s still available for Twitter small talk. I really am glad to see that she uses more than just web-hosted images to help expose her work to the public, like posting videos on her YouTube channel. Some comments from her fans:

Hi there! Your work is really cool! I fell in love with your comics and your pictures!

u rock!!!

omg ming you’re awsome

Your material is inspiring! Thank you!

The flattery is nearly endless. Anyway, here’s the part of the article when I copy/paste her bio and just let you judge her work.

I was born in Boston in the Fall of 1984 to an Irish American sailor and a Chinese Canadian librarian. In the Fall of 1991 I saw a million ducks and predicted the Harry Potter franchise’s formula for success with startling accuracy.

My formative years were spent at the Nation’s oldest co-educational institution and oldest continuously running boarding school, with a brief layover in the People’s Republic of China for some noodles. In 2007 I earned my BFA from Cornell University with a dual concentration in painting and drawing.

I am currently working on art all night and every day. I would probably love an espresso.

Examples of Ming’s work:

Ming Doyle’s Website, YouTube, and Twitter.