Formatting Wishes

I have always envied the formatting capabilities Medium offers to its users. While no longer as revolutionary today as when Medium debuted, in those early days it presented a beautifully designed reading experience. Substack offers many of the same formatting features, but I would love to see them innovate and push web styling (both on-site and in-app) to offer a more magazine-like feel.

I am not a designer. As much as possible, I leave that work to professionals like and others who possess those specialized skill sets. What follows is likely not an exemplar of good design, but it does showcase the types of features I would love to see Substack adopt. Specifically, text wrapping around images. In a perfect world, we’d also get drop caps, but we’ll fight that battle another day.

Below, you’ll find an eight page story that combines text and images. It’s not a new idea. Newspapers, books, and magazines have been doing this for over a thousand years. Other websites already do this now, but it’s my sincere wish that Substack would offer the ability to format things in this way because I believe it would really make all of our newsletters stand out as both beautiful and professional.

What I’ve done has been a very manual process involving creating images first in watercolor, then altering or finishing them digitally, then importing them into a layout application that could handle text flow. It was much more labor intensive than I thought it would be and maybe that’s a good argument for why this shouldn’t be done, but I do have faith in the engineers at Substack that they could figure out an easier way to make this work. My big problem was that I was drawing and painting everything. It wouldn’t have been nearly as involved if I had been using stock photography. Regardless, I hope you enjoy the piece and that you’ll join with me in hoping that some form of these features make their way here eventually.

Lessons Learned

This was designed to be read on a smart phone in the app. You can still read it on a desktop computer, but the best experience is to click on the first image from within the app and then swipe through the remaining pages.

Leave a comment

What’s Next?

This week, I’ll be doing some livestreams devoted to exploring some topics that interest me and that I hope will interest you as well. If you can’t make the live conversation, I’ll be sharing the recordings at a later date.

Also, I look forward to getting back to publishing new fiction. I’ll be introducing you to one of my favorite characters who will take on an increasingly important role in the stories to come. She’s old, feisty, and opinionated. I think you’ll like her.

There are some areas where I deviated from her original idea. Originally, I wanted to include glowing fireflies as well, but that doesn’t work because of where the story is located.

I didn’t include the moon because I wanted to play with the background lighting to not only create a sense of depth but also of magic/mystery. I was thinking about the northern lights, but I didn’t want to lean into it too heavily because I wanted the lighting to be ambiguous and open to interpretation.

Finding that right balance between what the client wants and what makes for a good image is the main thing an illustrator does. Sure, it’s the painting part is a big component, but more than that it’s interpreting their wishes in a way that achieves their goals even if they can’t vocalize or explain what they’re looking for.

This is why for most of my illustration work I work digitally. It allows me to quickly iterate and change things in ways that simply wouldn’t be possible working traditionally. Don’t get me wrong. When I say I work digitally, I’m still manually sketching and painting everything out entirely by hand, but working on a computer allows me to easily more easily manipulate the image to my client’s whims. Also, there is Undo… which doesn’t exist with real life media. I still enjoy drawing and painting with real world pencils and paints, but the older I get the more I appreciate the ability to zoom in to see things that would have me squinting in the real world.

The lighting on the hound went through several variations. I understood that she wanted muted lighting, but I wanted to use the lighting as a way to make the wolfhound stand out against the background and to better attract attention. This was my attempt to do that.

While I was experimenting with ways to make the fire-type lighting more muted, I stumbled onto giving it tints of blue and knew that I had the winner. I showed the image to Sally and we were done.

I understand that many artists want to re-use their book cover assets for things like t-shirts and coffee mugs. This is an area where digital really shines because as long as you have painted different components on different layers, you can toggle visibility of those layers on or off.

For that reason, it wasn’t too much work to provide an altered version of the ghost hound on a transparent background. It was about twenty minutes of work to pull the dog out and clean up some rough edges or create a border for the grass on which he stands. The big thing here is that it provides an image with a transparent background that Sally can use for coffee mugs and things like that.

Lastly, I’ve decided to jump into Created with Human Intelligence campaign by making my own version of her badge and attaching it to the image. While I do professional work digitally, the spirit of Beth’s campaign seems to be to make the badges traditionally. So, that’s what I’ve done. You can see my version of the badge below:

And here’s the badge affixed to my cover art. I will disclose that I did do some digital clean-up for my lettering because I wanted it to look cleaner than the version I did in pencil.

Good luck on your launch, Sally!

So, I’ve done a sketch of one of my favorite horror actors: Tony Todd. The reference image I used is from the movie Candyman. You can see the reference image here:

Here’s my completed drawing. I didn’t nail the likeness as much as I would have liked, but given the time constraints I had it’s not horrible. It’s not perfect either, but oh well…

Tony Todd is probably most famous (at least to members of my generation) for his role in Candy Man, but my favorite Todd role is Final Destination. In that movie he plays the role of a funeral home owner, but they drop several hints that he is much more than a mortician. That’s the thing that I enjoy most about his character in those movies. It’s the mysterious relationship he has with Death. I won’t say more than that for fear of spoiling a great movie experience for those who haven’t seen the films.

Do you have a favorite Tony Todd movie or role? If so, what is it?

Leave a comment

There is a natural inclination for people who are just beginning to take drawing seriously to attempt to draw what they see rather than to understand why various elements look the way they do. That’s not to say that it’s impossible to become an accomplished draftsman by copying what you see, but I think it’s easier if you understand the factors that influence the shapes as well as attaining the manual dexterity needed to replicate those forms.

Let’s begin with the most basic shape that is going to influence our depiction of the human eye: the sphere of the eyeball itself.

For this, I’ve just drawn a circle, but it’s important to visualize it as an actual 3D object if possible. If you struggle with that, then, feel free to lightly draw contour lines to help remind you of the form.

Next, we’re going to add the pupil. Again, I’ve depicted it as a simple circle, but you can feel free to add contour lines if you like.

One important thing to understand about the pupil is that it is raised away from the sphere of the eye. I’ve exaggerated how much it’s raised to make the point because of how much this raised surface influences the shapes of the eyelids.

The pupil can and does move around. For that reason, I believe it’s important to draw the pupils first because once you know where they are then you’ll understand how to depict the shape of the eyelids.

The eyelids conform to the shape of the eyeball and the shape of the pupil. For that reason, it’s important to show those folds of skin wrapping around the underlying shapes. The highest part of the arch of the upper eyelid is always going to be located in the center of the pupil. This— and wrapping the eyelids around the shape of the eye— are the most important part of depicting the underlying anatomy.

In this image, I’ve changed the location of where the pupil is focused to show you how it affects the shape of the eyelids. Additionally, I’ve suggested the outer edges of the eyelids by adding some lines that mirror the contours of the lid’s opening.

The next step is to draw the circle for the iris and add the lines that depict the rods and cones for the pupil. I haven’t shaded this in all the way yet, but I did want to point out something about light reflection.

The eye is moist. The pupil is raised up away from the eyeball. For that reason, if you have a strong light source shining on one side of the pupil, light will pass through the pupil and will be depicted as a bright spot on the opposite side. At times, you’ll also see the light being reflected on the iris itself.

Once more, I’ve changed the position of the pupil to show how it influences the shapes of the lids.

Below, I have begun to shade out the eye and add some additional details to show wrinkles and reveal the geometry of the underlying shapes.

One thing that’s easy to forget when shading the eye is that the eyelid itself and the pupil all cast shadows. For that reason, the areas immediately under the top eyelid will be darker on the pupil and the areas around the pupil.

The more detail you add to these areas the more aged and elderly your character will appear. If you are drawing someone who is young, your goal is to hint at the forms by subtle changes in tone and value. The younger the character is the more restrained you want to be in your use of hard lines.

Hard lines equal age.

The last step and one that isn’t always needed is to add eyelashes. I say it’s not always needed because the eyelashes aren’t normally visible in any detail unless you have some type of zoomed in view like we have below. If you’re drawing a portrait from say three feet away, the eyelashes will only be visible as a darkened line around the the eyelids.

Additionally, the circle that you’ve been using to show the outer edge of the eyeball can be used to depict the eye socket by erasing the hard edges and smudging the line so it looks more like a shadow. The idea here is to just hint at the idea— not to go out of your way depicting that shape… unless your character is emaciated or elderly.

If you decide to try your hand at drawing an eye, I hope you’ll share the results with us. If you have questions, feel free to ask. I’m happy to help.

Posting this today was a bit of an experiment. Please let me know if this type of content interests you or not. Thanks.

Share