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