Rob Pane
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Rob Pane
@robpane.bsky.social
31 followers 120 following 0 posts
Into reading comics, drawing cartoons, 80s glam rock, Greek mythology, writing poetry, and old electronics.
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An interview with Stan Drake from 1969. You can feel his impatience that no one has invented Photoshop yet.
DRAKE: Yes, I really feel at my best when I'm moving my body-swimming in the pool, or playing golf, or going down a bobsled run, or bowling-doing some-thing like that. I've never been able to understand how I'm able to sit at the drawing board for all those hours, considering that I enjoy moving around so much. I would have expected that someone like me would be literally climbing the walls-sitting at the drawing board for thousands of hours. HURD: Would you say something about that new method of drawing backgrounds that you figured out? DRAKE: Well, in my never-ending search for easier ways to do things, I hit upon this idea to be the only man in the business using electronic machinery in the production of my comic strip. I found, if I copied a halftone photograph on a Xerox machine, that often the halftones were washed out and very light and that just the basic black lines remained. In other words, the machine would, in effect, turn out what amounted to a line drawing of whatever subject was involved. You see, this particular machine was designed to copy let-ters and not halftone photos. When I first discovered this, I was doing a sequence where the characters were out at sea in a big ship. I wanted to show a drawing of this ocean liner, but I couldn't conceive of myself sitting down there, pencil-ing and then inking, this huge ship with all the win-dows and the superstructure. It got me thinking. For my first experiment I got hold of a photo of one of the big liners and ran it through a friend's Xerox. As I said before, the halftones were almost entirely washed out, leaving this incredibly detailed line drawing of a ship. I proceeded to cut it out, and I pasted it right into a panel of Juliet Jones. Then I simply inked in the ship, going right over the lines that appeared on the photo-copy and strengthening them. In about forty-five min-utes I had this complete, absolutely accurate, fantastic rendition. On another occasion-Juliet and Eve were living in New York a…
August 31, 2026 at 6:06 AM