The pain of drawing is that it takes two hours of throwing away drawing to get the fifteen minutes that produce the right rhythm in the drawing. Now drawing’s have to be abstraction that work as drawing not just figures, and after a day of teaching it’s hard to go back to that.
There’s something very opposite of figure drawing in looking at a tree in two minutes . Especially when you’ve been drawing the tree off and on for forty years or so. And it must be at least a 100 or so years old.
Jim Shooter has a great rant up on his web site about inking, any young artist should go read it and integrate it into their work.
It shows what made Shooter so successful his ability to analyze what works and describe it in some form. His lecture on storytelling is also wonderful, great basic primers in doing comics, but sometimes he goes a little off, like this…
“Someday, I will find the guy who invented the expression “spotting blacks,” and kill him with my shoe. Spotting blacks—scattering black areas around the panel stupidly? WHAT? There are people who should know better who advocate making an “interesting pattern,” an “abstract design” with the placement of black areas in the panel. They are insane. ”
But then I look at a picture like this.
Looking it I say, abstract design, yup, black areas scattered around the panel, yup, intereseting pattern, that too. It makes a guy wonder is Jack Kirby insane, did he know what he was doing? At first looking at this drawing I thought Jack was doing just what Shooter claimed, just spotting blacks to make the page more exciting and energetic. Like I said Shooter is really smart and analytical and knows comics…