New Gods era Kirby was interested in realism at all, he reduced figures to blocky shapes with swirls to decorate, express speed, light and form. I’m trying to bring some of the attitude from comics into life drawing.
The struggle for an artist is to make sure the work gets ‘better”, closer to my “vision”.
The game assignment was to create a practice, like John Wooden did for basketball, that was simple and allows for immediate assessment.
The next step is to apply what I learn to art practice.
For more go here intro to practice post
The three games I came up with were
Game 1: 2 Minute Teeth
The game was to brush 2 minutes a night which is what most dentist’s recommend. By dividing my mouth into left, right up and down, grouping inside and outside I end up with 4 parts. If I do a part inside for a fifteen count and the outside count for fifteen I get a point. So four points for two minutes of brushing means my night time brushing is being achieved.
Game 2: Night Stretching
To releave night time aches and pains from a days work and to sleep better.
Do three stretches, start with icing my feet for plantar fascias, a yoga stretch nd using a roller on my lower legs. All of these to counter some chronic pain that has developed over the years with MS. I got a point for each exercise.
This would improve my sleep by hopefully stopping cramping and plantar fascias, which is when the tendons between heel and ball of your foot cramp up.
Game 3: Shot, Reverse Shot, Reaction
Draw a person, from tv or during the day.
Draw a place, thing or other person from random reference
Draw the person reaction to whatever the second drawing is.
This is to work on my lack of character design and not thinking about characters in making a story. Not exactly a life skill but I am making up the rules here.
2 Minute Teeth
I was trying to spend more time on brushing my teeth at night.
It’s not a physically hard task, but at the end of the day my patience to be a goody two shoes isn’t there and I often pay little attention.
This game has worked.
I’m spending more time on brushing my teeth then a casual late night swish.
The game’s structure makes me focus on the task at a time when I am fatigued.
This small challenge keeps me focused for the two minutes.
Counting to fifteen 4 times, is easier then doing one thing for two minutes.
Even if they add up to the same thing.
Night Stretching
They just didn’t happen after the first week.
It’s easier to sit and do nothing then exercise.
What didn’t work?
I start by rolling my feet over a plastic bottle filled with frozen water, simple and easy.
By not putting the bottle back in the freezer at the end, the next night couldn’t even start because there was no iced bottle.
So I quit
The yoga stretches, did my hip and the feet but provided no energy to continue.
And using the roller is so much physical work that at the end of the day it feels hard.
Character Design
I’ve always been more interested in graphic flow and relationships between panels, not art school angst, super-heroic anxiety dynamics or political commentary.
But the reality is people care about characters not “art”.
So this is a good focus for me.
But the rules were so loosely I didn’t do this at all.
Having to pick a character at the end of the day is work in of itself.
The reverse shot, once again more choice, then I want to do at night.
The drawings, were they full sketchbook pages?
thumbnails?
Hand drawn panels?
There were no rules to say what was a win or loss.
My 2 Minute Teeth had a clear rule to work on character I need rules as clear as
“The game” requiring thought, focus and decision making at the end of the day,
so I went back to copying Kirby while watching TV.
Practice games should reduce the amount of thought and decision making so you just have one critical point that is being achieved at a time.
Actual art practice probably needs to be done during the day.
Make the task simple, clearly defined, and cut out decision making.
Having a win loss factor in terms of numbers is good
Especially at the end of the day I can’t make creative choices.
It needs to be for automatic skills and performance based work.
Must have a simple entry to start, especially if it’s low energy.
Art practice has to actually move to the day and into the “Tens”
Pick apart the area like character design so that you are working on small skills not large ones. Kathy Sierra says
“Deliberate practice is when you work on a skill that requires 1 to 3 practice sessions to master. If it takes longer than that, then you are working on something that is too complex.”
Define what the skill is I am trying to practice and master.
Rename it
Red Chair
Goal: To stretch my legs and back at the end of the day for better sleep.
Goal is to get the old man’s body off the floor,in the chair, so he can veg out while drawing in his sketchbook.
Start on the floor, with no energy.
First move is twists in half lotus for a count of ten. 1 pt
Forward bends with twists, twice 2 pt.
Leg rolls front and back ten times 1 pt
Extra points for getting the ice bottle and rolling the feet.
So that if I forget to refreeze it it doesn’t just stop me from doing the rest of the exercises.
Voila I’m sitting in chair waiting for scotch&soda, slippers and sketchbook.
3 Panels
Goal: Keeping a consistent character with different reactions.
Steps
1 print out a strips work sheet for my sketchbook for seven days.
Pick one character to work on for the seven days. Use either a character from a project, a life drawing model or a comics character read that week
Do a side, front and 3/4 shot of the character in the first set of boxes.
Write a note in the middle panels using an event from daily journal in some form.
Use the Journal as a starting point to come up with ideas, feel free to improvise.
Draw panel 1 as a set up and panel three as a reaction to whatever is in the middle of the page.
Assessment:
Review seven strips, draw a new side profile and 3/4 shot of the characters. Write up some notes of how it’s affected.
Rubric:
Does it look like the same person for all seven days?
Does the head shape and design for all the positions look like it’s the same form over the 7 days.
Do I understand the characters thoughts and feelings with greater depth.
Can I write a 100 word biography of the character now?
Comics can seem like a perfect objects, egg like, unbreakable little masterpiece, freshly popped from a chicken. But to be a creator you need to read differently. Any comic, can be a useful, if you can discover the craft of it’s making. So you need to kill Humpty Dumpty. Break that perfect egg into tiny little pieces so you understand how it’s made.
Teachers provide you with a hundred rules to make comics. Commercial publishing houses dictate their house styles. But good artists make their own work, not follow the rules of others. Good artists make their rules from that of other artists and the real world.
As a kid we start by copying someone else’s work. To often it’s the cool pin-up shot, the gross out parody, the dramatic single image. Pick an image, lift it directly from one artist insert it into your own work, claim it as your own. That’s a swipe. Is it possible to do something other then a swipe?
If you break apart the work like it’s Humpty Dumpty? You can turn your work into a nice omelette, tasty and transformed into something greater then the simple egg.
If your visual, it’s always easiest to start with copying.
It’s the most basic learning approach for artists. Rembrandt copied work from the Italian Renaissance. Kirby copied Milton Caniff. Mingola copied Kirby.
There’s a book, Rembrandt and the Italian Renaissance by Kenneth Clark that outlines Rembrandt’s practice of swiping from all sorts of artists.
Rembrandt and the Italian Renaissance
It’s a study how Rembrandt didn’t just swiped but took things from a wide variety of sources to make his own work. It’s a process that you could follow with almost any great artist.
So in building a practice plan we step outside of just swiping. The goal is to to find the craft underneath the art. That craft is what makes the actual thing we are looking at. Pull apart the work and you can find gems in any artist.
To break the comic apart you need to smash it against a wall, figuratively. Drawing makes you look and is a challenge to the skill of duplicating shapes. But writing frees you to ask questions about the work from a different perspective Writing about the work can take you out of using your well developed art skills.
Write short sentences, one sentence to a line. Make each sentence clear. Start with reporter 101 questions, who, what, when, where, why and how. As you answer the questions you’ll write a description of the comic.
Why ask the questions first? Because the questions will change the way you look at the work and make you think outside of your personal taste.
Personally I’m obsessed with the way your eye moves from panel to panel in comics. I look first at how the compositions do or don’t fit together in comics. That’s why I’m happy drawing abstract comics. I can read Peanuts, as an exercise in formal design, very happily. But that’s a very limited reading of a great comic strip.
In this strip I first described it as an exercise in visual design. Horizontal compositions across three panels that lead you into a vertical upright in four. That’s the art setup. But then ask the question, why is Snoopy lying down? Because he’s obviously one cool cat who doesn’t have to jump up and down at his “master”. Compare the relaxation of the first three panels with two days later where Snoopy is paying attention to Charlie Brown with interest.
The question “Why is Snoopy lying down?” leads to interesting thoughts about his personality and reactions. His calm cool non-reactive pose makes the alertness of his Shakespeare quote even funnier. Asking the questions led me away from my first and usual reaction to the pages. It led to discovery in a way I wouldn’t normally think.
Who
Who’s the artist? The writer? The characters? What’s the character’s history? Can you write a bio for the characters? Do the characters have jobs, life styles? Family?
What
What is the art made out of? It’s not just the physical tools. But look at the the actual stuff of line shape and color. The weight of the line should reveal as much about the story as anythng else in the panel.
What is the plot? What is the character’s personality? What’s the size of the shapes? What’s in the background? Does the background intermingle with the figures? What’s the relationship between time in the story and time spent on scene?
As you write look for the intersection of story, script and pictures in making the comic.
When
What’s the time involved in the story? How long is it? How long is spent on a scene? If the trap at the end takes 4 panels is that as important as the guest characters taking 3 pages talking?
Because your thinking of comics where and when are related. Time is controlled by the space on the page and where you put things. You have a scene, when does the artist break the scene into panels? When do characters appear in what way as they move across a sequence of panels?
When you look at the work ask what do you see first? Why do you see one character before another?
When do you put all the separate images into a whole sequence? When do you understand the drawing?
Where
Where are the images placed in the panel? Dividing any image up into a grid gives you a basic composition. Can you describe major shapes on the page that control how your eye moves? Where are the characters standing in three dimensional space versus two?
Why
Use you imagination to enter into the artists mind you are looking at. Like a five year old child, ask why of everything? Why are these shapes here and not over there? Why did these figures get silhouetted on panel 3 page 16?
How
How is representation handled? Cartoony? Completely rendered? Cross hatching or fluid brush lines? How does it work? How big is it? How are you shown things? How important is this part “hand, fabric, shadows” to the drawing? How does it make you feel?
I’m talking about a different kind of writing then the usual comics criticism. Most critics write so they can discuss Batman, black leather and bondage. (And yes, comics critics who can’t describe the drawings aren’t worth much) This is looking, reading and writing to find the craft of making comics.
Comics include all the skills of visual and literary arts. So if you just do literary analysis of a comic your not talking about comics.
Drawing makes you consider the work in one way, description forces you to look in another mode. Making the words work is one more way to force your brain out of, “Holy shit mode”. This is about slowing your process in your brain and steppingout of the role as a reader. All art is about making a choice.
In describing the work your following a pattern of choices that the creator made. Your outlining what they did that you think is important. The goal is to define skills that can be isolated worked on and improved.
Write 100 words on how simple practice plans from the previous post. Focus on what is working, what do you do that makes things easier to work with.
2.1 Revision
Looking at the three games you created for yourself in 1.1, take the one that worked the best, what worked and see how you can apply it the game that worked the least.
2.2 Artist Study
Pick an artist your interested in.
Pick 4–6 pages, copy the pages.
Write out all the questions you can think of for the work.
Answer the questions
Don’t stop until you have 500 words.
This is the subject of play and how we are going to make things
Set a timer for twenty minutes.
List all of the skills you think are involved in drawing a comic book.
Look at your three artists.
List any skills they have that you do not.
Weekly confronting drawing