If I can’t draw, what is the first thing I can do , draw straight lines, find big lines to draw in the shapes. Of course in learning to draw I can actually judge how things are positioned in space relatively well, I understand perspective so I can’t throw out all my judgments, when drawing a leg I can see where the other leg should be spaced.
And all the drawing I’ve looked at and done informs my hand eye co-ordination.
After twenty or so years of commuting and drawing and drawing and commuting, people no longer ask if I’m a student as I draw on a bus. Perhaps it’s the grey hair giving me away. But these days I’m wanting to throw out all my skills and try to draw like I don’t know how to draw. I want to start over and not just draw well but find drawing as a way to explore to try things out again.
learning how to draw all over again and seeing what will come out.
Alex Toth did a great story called White Devil yellow Devil that was set in world War Two, when it came out I didn’t know who he was or that it was supposed to be cool but the patterns he created with foliage was just something I’ve never seen before. As I’ve been drawing this story I’ve thought about the and their portrayal of modern city’s through loose brushstrokes but in the end my brain just wanted to do a Toth on the foliage at the end of this story.
A page from the story…
Erik Weems has written a nice article with a couple of larger scans of it, now I have to go find the whole story somewhere in my box of comics.
And I hate the fact that html tags take all sorts of work to get them to work right in WordPress, I guess i have to upgrade, sighhhhh.
I love drawing backgrounds, it’s somewhat self indulgent to fiddle with your backgrounds, but drawing New York City is just fun. partially NYC just looks the way a comic book city is supposed to look, water towers tons of people of all sorts, buildings from all time period it makes me feel young again. There’s nothing like drawing Union Square where looking downtown the main building is the New School at 14th and university, looking uptown is the view from the rooftop of Parsons Fine Arts Department. Anything that creates that feel of being a kid and sitting around discussing “profound” ideas about art can only make me happy.
Here’s the New School in the background.
And you’ll notice in the background again the same drawing, scaled alittle differently and with a different value. And no people walking around, since the panel is to small to have any distractions in it.
And here’s the actual drawing done as it’s own Movie Clip in Flash, since it’s a Movie Clip I can re-use it, re-size it and set the value of it to change in any way I want. Flash because it’s built with objects, move the drawing sometime from being about the making all the shapes work together to collaging your own drawings together. It makes it more fun to draw backgrounds and then put the people on another layer so you can have them in or out depending on the scene and time.
And just some playing with the brightness.
