Preview of 3 Feb!

Hey, Everybody!
I've got an exercise in face construction-- in ¾ view --for next time. One of those deals where one tries, and then sees how the try differs from a photo.

And to nail down our working knowledge of perspective for comics, I've done an improved and tested exercise much like our last one. But good.

Remember these drawings? I'm using this for promoting my SUNDAY Comics Class in Petaluma, which will start on the 4th of February, and with luck continue at least through the 11th.

Keep Drawing!

Till Saturday, 

John

Facebook Event Listing for this session

Prop Design Principles

Reference

Throw a wide net. Look for motifs, shape ideas.

Scale

Consider the size of the user

Shape Experiments

from The Skillful Huntsman

Ergonomics/comfort

Imagine holding it, using it

from The Skillful Huntsman

Internal Proportions Experiments

from The Skillful Huntsman

 Supplement to this Week's Perspective Exercise

from How to Draw by Scott Robinson et al

Current Assignments. Calendar Note

Hi, you guys!
The current assignment, due in three weeks because I’ve got a con on the 27th, is to take a penciled page or a page layout like one of the in-class exercises, and do two black plans (examples below ) for it. I suggest you do it on a xerox or digitally or on tissue paper, so you can non-destructively take two runs at the same page. Gray marker works well because it leave the lines visible. But black marker is probably a more rigorous test.
 The point is to take the anxiety out of spotting blacks by experimenting before committing.

I'll be away on 27 January, for a little con up here in cow and chicken land.

Also, I've gone back to yesterday's lesson and finished added the verbal part, so you can know why I used the examples I did., what they were intended to demonstrate. 

An important change: the day of our Sidewalk Comics Fest is changed to April 29, one week earlier, to beat Free Comics Day. 

John

Why put blacks on a page, anyway?

Expression/Expressionism

 Artist Mandrafina made a non-literal background of big black shapes to express these guys' joy at the apparent death of their enemy. 

Additionally, dropping simple shapes behind figures makes them come forward, because our mind interpolates the rest of the shape, perceiving it as existing, in full, behind them.

Mandrafina, The Big HoaX/ The IGUANA

Weirdness

Making people look creepy with uplighting! Classic.

Mandrafina, The Big HoaX/ The IGUANA

Evoking the Unknown

What terrors lurk in the jungle? We see only some suggestions in the mysterious blackness of night. It connects with our most primal fears.

Mandrafina, The Big Hoax/ The IGUANA 

Fixing Characters in 3D space 

...with well-drawn drop shadows that accompany the military guy, making him look very there.

Mandrafina, The Big Hoax/ The IGUANA

Evil! E-e-evil, I tells ya!

Bruce Timm makes great use of black and aggressive pointy shapes to add brutal power.

Bruce Timm

Design

Russell Patterson was as much graphic designer as cartoonist, and he was a fantastic cartoonist. Note how he uses the panel border and the lifeguard to break up the big black, potentially oppressive umbrella shape. For story reasons, he uses black to group the women, and sets them at an unfortunate remove from the boy. His isolation from where he wants to be is made clear.

Russell Patterson

Not Sure

What does this one demonstrate? You decide; I'm admiring how Patterson held the man's form against, and by, the mostly black patterned door. Also, the whole thing is beautiful.
And one student Saturday noted the success of the composition: how her dress's train points at him, as his shoes point at her. Their overall shapes complement each other in a way that keeps our eye cycling around the two of them, relegating the beautifully arranged background elements to. supporting roles.

Russell Patterson

Achieving Beautiful Minimalism

Alex Toth, using the drop shadow of the gun so show how close it is to the hero.

Letting the airplane be mostly black, breaking up the black of the doorway of the hangar with the wing (and there balloon), using the long shadows fix the position of the men in space, having those shadows carry on, to the right of the plane, knowing the shadow of the wing will fall on the prop. Toth does it all, and makes it look easy.

Bravo for Adventure by Alex Toth

More Mandrafina?

Sure: Check the silhouette, emphasizing action and pose in panel 3. In the next-to-last panel, look at how he uses white-against-black-against-white so he can dispense with outline almost entirely. He lets your brain finish the brim of the hat. Nice trick! Looks so good. Awesome, accomplished almost-unknown artist.

Mandrafina, The Big Hoax/ The IGUANA

Masterful use of repetition  to show time passing, through 3 panels. Look how astutely he changed the lighting on the church as the moon sets.

Mandrafina, The Big Hoax/ The IGUANA
Seriously! How about this guy?

Separation of planes

In page-spanning panel 5, Wendling expertly uses a background of silhouetted trees to create a background plane that pushes the contrasting log forward into the middle ground. The restrained use of black shadows on the log and roots effectively makes a different "color" for that plane, separating it from the more distant, entirely open (i.e., white) part of the bank.

Claire Wendling

Off-Topic Interlude

I'm always stressing line weight variation, line quality variation, because it bring such graphic life to our art. I feel that if you are going to use a dead, nearly unvarying line, you are writing a big check. Those lines better be going just where you need them to go.

Here, Wendling makes good on that deal, using a clean, fine animator's clean-up line in a character drawing. Economy and precision. One way in which she does vary the line is in mixing straight and curved segments. Something her designs share with Bruce Timm's, and some classic Disney.

Claire Wendling

Depersonalization, Menace

Blacking in the faces of the soldiers in the next to last panel suggests so much: These guys are up to no good, they expecting to work anonymously, they are suppressing the human sides of themselves.
(You can achieve some of the same brutish feeling just by having the eyes disappear in the shadow of the brow. But make sure you're consistent: The nose, cheekbones and jaw should also create heavy shadows.)

Mandrafina, The Big Hoax/ The IGUANA

Toth, the Super-Minimalist

Pure speed, no distractions. Toth drew a lot of hot-rod cartoons in the 60s.

Toth

Design, expressionism and so much black...

...combine in a very simple Patterson drawing that is heavy with threat, anxiety, uneasiness and surveillance. The inverted buildings (yes?) menacingly point down at the fugitive.

Russell Patterson

How do you create panels without gutters?

Alex Robinson says, alternate black and white backgrounds.
This is worth reading. Very funny in a snide, smug way, which is one of my favorite ways.

Alex Robinson Box Office Poison

Okay, this is pure genius.

Influential superstar Kevin Nowlan uses an inanimate background element, a shadowed brick wall, to express a loss of consciousness!

Plastic Man Kevin Nolan

Toth uses blacks to great effect

Look at how many objects are mostly black and how beautifully that works. He makes strong, simplified shapes primarily of black, but uses bits of white to sell the perspectives of the walls and to round out the cloaks as they turn toward the light. The bits also offer relief in what would otherwise be flat, monolithic blackness.

Paul Revere and Jonny Tremaine, Alex Toth 

The use of silhouette in panel 3 draws attention to their furtive motions as they approach the house.

Paul Revere and Jonny Tremaine, Alex Toth 

See you on 20 January, team!

John

JANUARY! First Month, First Principles

Welcome Back to All! Welcome to Newbies!

Can you feel it?

Can you feel 2018-- the zing in the cool air, the glistening potential of a fresh new year that--as of this posting-- has hardly been ruined at all?

Look ahead, not to the world events of a year that might make us all feel even more helpless and embarrassed to be Americans, but to the thing you can control: Making kick-ass comics.

First let us pause to review the golden ideas we've hit on over the last year.  Look back in awesome wonder at...

• The Second Pair of Eyes -- the essential, indispensable thing this class provides, which you can also find among friends and peers. Think of how you guys schooled me (kindly and correctly) on those Batman layouts. That's learning, lemme tell you. But there has to be something on the table first. So...
• Wake up and draw! Get a few lines drawn on your project before breakfast, before internet. It'll change your day.
• Draw Through; Draw FROM FORM! This becomes a habit as much as a skill. Lack of it is the root of most "off" drawing. Takes practice to develop the eye for it, to see if your underdrawing is working well before you commit to a more detailed finish.
• Diagonals Add Dynamism!
• Silhouettes Sell the Action! If you imagine your figures' contours TOTALLY filled in black, and the idea of the panel still reads, you've succeeded.
• Simplicity! The most obvious way of showing an action is very often the best, because it's likely to be the simplest, the most on-point. If you do choose to add extra punch with a more dramatic angle or what have you, make sure that the essential simplicity remains.
• Simplicity Again! Sure, non-artists will always be impressed by scads of detail. (And they are the biggest potential part of your audience...) But we have learned, I hope, to beware detail and other elaboration that distracts from the point of a panel. Fussy details can be made to serve the story as well as dazzle the easily dazzled: see the Tweet by Greg Smallwood linked below.
• Simplify Shapes for Power! Remember too that both the outer contour and the internal shadow scheme of a figure or other object become more powerful when simplified --reduced to straight lines and strong curves, e.g. Bonus: this comes at no cost to convincingness and certainly not to power. Consider the work of Phil Hester. It beautifully illustrates these first six points!

  

  Green Arrow --  Line Art by Phil Hester and Ande Parks

• Simplification, the Problem-Solver When you struggle to draw a particular thing--like the shadow on a face--go back a step or two and see if you can't improve it at the level of your under-drawing, where Form is your focus. If it works in blue pencil, it's going to work after you have added all the details. (Corollary: If it don't, it won't!) If it still doesn't work, there is no shame whatsoever in using reference or showing it another way, simply. This thinking is best done on a side scrap of tracing paper, btw, for traditional artists.
• One idea per panel! Sure, you can slip in a background glimpse of the bucket that the clumsy sidekick is going to step into two panels hence--you can and you should set stuff up like that so it doesn't come out of nowhere. But trying to show two or more ideas or actions in the same panel is tough and generally best avoided, for clarity's sake. People often read comics quickly.
• VARIETY, VARIETY, VARIETY DEEPLY enriches our work. And it isn't hard to achieve. It brings huge graphic life and trouble-proofs your compositions when you...

...vary line weight, and line quality, within a drawing,

...vary sizes of the heads and figures on a page, the poses,

...vary the angles at which figures and objects are shown, the way the figures are cropped by panels,

...vary the intervals of the divisions within all things (E.g., rather than splitting a lock of hair into two equal sub-locks (*snore*), divide it into three differently sized parts! Boredom defeated, instant interest achieved.).

• Contrast Finds the Eye! Here's a nice explanation by artist Greg Smallwood:

— Greg Smallwood (@SavageSmallwood) January 5, 2018

• Repetition -- Always with a Purpose! This one, you current guys know.
• You Are the Director! When you actually put yourself in charge of your own work emotionally, you happily control the ways things are formed and arranged to serve YOUR story, like the appalling auteur egotist dictator you are. Doing this well might be the hardest thing on this list. But you can do it.
• No Points for Subtlety in Comics! This is still, at heart, a tawdry, cheap, exploitive ALL-CAPS, BOLD ITALICS, BLATANT MEDIUM, if you're doing it right. Is there any reason not to have an element in your panel like, say, a pointing arm directing the eye to where you want them to look next? Hell, no. Once you've made some stupidly exciting, blunt-force comics, you'll know the tricks well enough to make Art, sil vous plait. You might even find you already have.
• Exclude the Unnecessary!
• Spot Blacks!

Glad you guys are with me in this, in our second big year.  I think I dreamt about you last night, collectively. Or maybe it was just a dream about kids in a pool. No one drowned anyway.

Best in 2018,
John