Arthur L. Guptill

Rendering In Pen & Ink
by Arthur L. Guptill

From The Comics Journal interview with Gerhard, December 2010:

TCJ:

I was wondering how many classic ink illustrators you’d looked at. Did you ever see the Arthur Guptill book Rendering in Pen & Ink?

GERHARD:

Geez, I've got a book named that. I wonder if that's the same one.

It's the one written in the '30s and reprinted sporadically since then.

Here it is! Arthur Guptill. I would refer back to it. Not that I would want to emulate anything in particular, because, again, I was just better off drawing the way I draw, but I would look through that and think, "Wow, that's the stuff."  Well, here we go, I just flipped it open and I obviously used some of that in Church & State, in the room that Jaka was in. Page 211. And here on 212 was the basis for one of the Epic illustrations. Not the color stories, but one of the individual illustrations we did and I colored up. That was definitely a reference for one of them. So, yeah, this book was something I would refer to often. But not too often, because sometimes I would just get out-and-out intimidated, as in "I can’t do that." Another one was Winsor McCay, Daydreams & Nightmares, and towards the end of the doing Cerebus I found Franklin Booth’s Painter With A Pen. It's phenomenal.

Booth was incredible. He's got a bunch of work in the Guptill book too.

Obviously, he would have to be in there. When I first started on Cerebus, I was over-rendering, using way too many lines. I tried to be more economical as I went along. But there was definitely a big learning curve for me.

Read the full interview with Gerhard at The Comics Journal: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3