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Spraygraphic Interview with Artist Danny Hellman
By Spraygraphic | April 21, 2008
Spraygraphic Interview with Danny Hellman
SG: Please tell us about yourself?
DH: I’m a commercial artist; I’ve been working professionally since the late 1980s. I started out doing posters for NYC bands in the mid-80s, and worked my way into newspaper and magazine illustration from there.
SG: Where do you currently live and work?
DH: I live in Park Slope, Brooklyn with my wife and daughter. I work from home.
SG: What mediums do you work with?
DH: I draw with Rapidographs on drafting vellum; I then scan and color the line art digitally in Photoshop.
SG: Describe your working process when creating a new work.
DH: When I’m doing an illustration for a publication, I start out by reading the article that I’ve been asked to illustrate, (or in many instances, the art director will toss me a few lines summarizing of the story, because the story is still in the process of being written). I then do a rough sketch, which I send to the art director; the sketch either gets approved, tweaked, or tossed out entirely, in which case I start on a second sketch. Once the art director approves a sketch, I begin work on the final art.
When I’m working on something for myself, I do whatever the Hell I want.
SG: What kind of things do you do when you get blocked or find it hard to create something?
DH: I’ve been doing illustrations for twenty years now, and it’s pretty rare when I find myself getting stuck when asked to generate a concept.Illo assignments usually come with short deadlines, and I never have the luxury of shelving a project until inspiration strikes. Typically I have no choice but to keep plugging away at rough sketches until I come up with something that works. Sometimes when I’m lucky, an art director will suggest a concept, which saves me the trouble of having to think at all.
SG: Where are you currently finding your inspiration?
DH: For me, inspiration comes out of nowhere, or out of the vacuum between thoughts. Occasionally when I’m lying at bed at night, trying to go to sleep, or when I’m out for a walk or riding my bicycle, ideas will strike me, and if I’ve been smart enough to have pen and paper nearby, I’ll quickly jot down a few notes, which will either develop over time into something useful, or end up in a dusty stack of post-it notes whose ultimate destination is a tall kitchen garbage bag.
SG: Do you have a favorite character that you like to draw?
DH: I draw a series of comic strips starring a character named Mister Pons, the hard-drinking brain stem. He’s a guy who has just a brain stem for a head, and he behaves accordingly.
SG: Can you tell us a little about Legal Action Comics?
DH: In the early 1990s, I published a mini-comic called “Legal Action Comics.” It’s contents were two filthy parody strips I’d done for SCREW Magazine lampooning Superman and The Simpsons. A few years later, when I found myself named as the defendant in a nuisance libel suit brought by the notorious idiot Ted Rall, I dragged the “Legal Action” title out of mothballs and used it for a pair of comics anthologies I published (in 2000 and 2004) to raise awareness about the case. For the last few years, I’ve been assembling a new comics anthology book which was originally conceived as “Legal Action Comics Volume Three,” but which is now entitled “TYPHON,” which will be published this Summer.
SG: How did you get into being an freelance artist for publications like Time, New York Press, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated?
DH: In my teens, I read a lot of Marvel comic books, and I wanted to draw them. After a few abortive attempts to break into that industry in the early 1980s, I floundered around for a few years in a haze of pot smoke. By 1984, I was working as a bike messenger, and started drawing poster art for my co-workers’ bands, (I also wheatpasted the posters up on the sides of buildings during the wee hours of the night). Sometime in 1988, I became aware that friends of mine were selling dirty drawings to SCREW Magazine, (New York’s legendary porn tabloid). I met with SCREW’s wonderful art director Kevin Hein, who was the first person to give me a paid art assignment. Soon I was drawing for SCREW on a regular basis, and from SCREW, I migrated to NEW YORK PRESS, and from there to GUITAR WORLD, the VILLAGE VOICE, and ever onward.
SG: What kind of deadlines do you work with when producing this kind of work?
DH: Different publications have different deadlines; sometimes I’ll have as much as a week or two to turn a job around, and sometimes as little as a day. On the average, I get about a week to turn most illo assignments around.
SG: Do the companies come back to you and say “change this” or “change that?”
DH: Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don’t. In most situations, the illustrator will do preliminary sketches which the art director and editors will review and comment on. It’s assumed that the changes will take place during the sketch phase, so that no one will be surprised by what they see in the final art. Occasionally it becomes necessary to change the art after it’s finished; one example would be something I did for a Public Relations Society publication in the early portion of this year’s Presidential primaries. I’d drawn seven or eight of the candidates, but as I was turning in the final art, Fred Thompson dropped out of the race, and Mike Huckabee, (who I hadn’t included in the drawing) had a good showing in Iowa. In this instance, I suggested to the editor that we snip Thompson out and replace him with Huckabee; after all, I’ve got just as much interest as the client in making sure that my illos don’t become stale before they hit the newsstand. On the other hand, sometimes you run into an inexperienced art director or editor who doesn’t understand the process, and thinks that it’s cool to make all kinds of changes after the art’s been finished; this can be a tough situation, requiring me to think carefully about what’s more important: yelling at an art director or getting paid. Nine times out of ten, it’s more important to get paid.
SG: How much are you willing to change? Is there some kind of negotiation process you go through?
DH: Sometimes, editors and art directors will suggest changes that vastly improve the illo, and in these instances, I’m always happy to oblige. It’s when I’m asked to make changes that ruin a concept that I dig my heels in for a tug-o-war; fortunately, this doesn’t happen too often.
SG: Where has your work been seen?
DH: All over the damned place; I’ve done illos for pretty much every magazine to can think of, from Time Magazine to Barely Legal. However, I’ve never been in Cat Fancy. For some reason, I just can’t seem to break in to Cat Fancy.
SG: Where will it be seen next?
DH: I get assignments from random publications all the time, and it can be hard to predict exactly where my work will turn up from month to month. I have a regular spot in the Washington Post’s weekend section; I’ve also been very fortunate lately to get frequent assignments from the Village Voice, the Phoenix New Times and Revolver.
SG: What is your dream art assignment?
DH: I can’t get enough Nazi-themed illos. I was also excited to draw Stalin and Vladimir Putin for the Voice in recent months. Pretty much any assignment that features Totalitarianism makes my pulse quicken.
SG: What is your favorite color?
DH: I like oxidized metal colors. I love the pastel green you see when copper is exposed to the elements over time; rusty iron is also beautiful.
SG: Who is your favorite artist? And Why?
DH: Picking a favorite artist is tough, because there’s always someone whose work you’ve never seen before, waiting to spring out from the pages of some obscure art book and blow your mind. One example would be a German named Otto Greiner (1869-1916), whose work I came across on the web about a year ago, and have been drooling over ever since. I love a lot of those World War One-era European guys, like Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Koloman Moser, Ferdinand Hodler, Georg Grosz, and the like. I’ve been a lifelong fan of the Czech Art Nouveau master Alphonse Mucha. I also worship at the feet of many mid-20th Century American commercial artists, including all the guys who drew for MAD Magazine in the Fifties and Sixties, like Bob Clarke, Jack Davis, George Woodbridge, Paul Coker, Jr., and Wally Wood. I’m also a huge fan of the American Science Fiction illustrator Virgil Finlay.
SG: What book/magazine are you reading this week?
DH: I rarely read magazines, because most of them are just garbage. I hate to say this, because I make my living sucking the blood of magazine publishing, but I really do think that most of what we see in magazines is inane filler, written and edited by hacks, consisting of corporate propaganda, advertainment, and celebrity-driven horseshit.
I tend to listen to audiobooks on my iPod, as opposed to actually reading books, because I can listen and do my work at the same time. I just finshed listening to Philip K. Dick’s “A Scanner Darkly,” which I found a little less impressive than I did when I read it in my twenties. I recently listened to Tim Weiner’s “Legacy of Ashes,” which was a real eye-opener, (depressing stuff about the CIA and its misdeeds).
SG: Ever do a self portrait? Where is it now?
DH: I do self portraits all the time. Last year, I worked myself and my wife into an illo I did for the real estate industry magazine HABITAT, showing the two of us at a co-op board meeting, (I drew myself passed out on a couch in the background while my wife argues with another board member). I also worked the two of us into a panel in a strip I drew for DC’s BIZARRO WORLD book, (as confused tourists who’ve stumbled into a dive bar where Aquaman is playing guitar at an open mike).
SG: Where is your favorite place to hang out?
DH: I’m 43 years old, with a young kid, so my “hanging out” days are a dim memory now. We live a few blocks away from Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, which is a beautiful place to spend a few hours, in all kinds of weather. I also enjoy pedaling my bicycle through decaying industrial neighborhoods.
SG: Any final words of advice?
DH: These are dark times for illustrators; the internet is eating print’s lunch. Many magazines have folded, and most have cut their illustration budgets. I pray that the day will come when web designers will kick their addictions to stock photography and bad clip art, and realize that they can hire actual working illustrators to liven up their shitty web pages. Until that day comes, my advice to aspiring illustrators is to draw constantly, take any assignment, (no matter how small), and don’t quit your day job.
Art: 1. santa-vs-dracula, 2. christmas, 3. santa-vs-satan, 4. batman, 5. bush zombies, 6. torture snakes, 7. nuke holocaust, 8. king ludwigs dream war, 9. cbgb, 10. 38th anniversary for screw
Topics: Artist Interviews, Graphic Design, Pencil Drawings, Toys and Comics |
