Feb 25 2011
I’m still on a music kick as far as my regular weekly portrait-drawing goes. For this past Tuesday’s #PortraitNight I did the guys in Fleetwood Mac. I would have liked to have done the whole band, but in the picture I was working from the males were in the foreground and the two women were in the background, too small to really draw. Maybe in the future I can find a different pic of the women, draw them in the same style, and then combine the two drawings in Photoshop.
Feb 22 2011
On the short list of most common problems with student comics artwork is “mitten hands.” You know what I’m talking about: a drawn hand that’s just a thumb hooked to an amorphous, fingerless blob. The close cousin of the mitten hand is the “hidey-hand” in which the character’s hands are always in his/her pockets, behind the back, concealed by a mysterious mist, etc. The common origin of these two problems is of course this: hands are hard to draw. But, check it; there’s a simple solution:
Q: How do I get better at drawing hands?
A: Draw hands.
Fortunately you have a handy <groan> reference freely available here in the form of your own hands which are conveniently attached to your body. You’ll note that many of my comics characters are left-handed. This is because I’m right-handed and can draw with my right hand while looking at my left hand. Ideally, though, you’d want to practice by drawing someone else’s hands. Unless you’re in some situation where there’s a regular life drawing session you can attend you’ll probably need to work from pictures.
For my hand-drawing exercises, I use magazines–specifically, I use TIME magazine (which I subscribe to anyway). If you’re going to do this, it’s preferable to use news magazines rather than, for example, fashion magazines. News magazines will contain candid shots of real people’s hands in natural poses; fashion magazines feature posed hands that are often quite unnatural. What I do is basically start at the beginning of the magazine and draw every hand I see that’s printed big enough for me to see and draw reasonably well. Then I just keep going until I’ve filled up a sketchbook page. That usually takes me around 45 minutes. Here are my three most recent hand exercise pages from my sketchbook:
You can use whatever drawing tools you find most comfortable. Personally, I feel that speed and volume of hands-drawn is far more important than laboring over each hand and trying to get them all perfect. (You can spot some real duds in the pages above, but that comes with the territory.) Accordingly, I use my favorite drawing pen, the Rotring Art Pen, and just start drawing directly in ink. As you can see, I sometimes–but not always–go in with Prismacolor marker afterwords and add some shading. Mitten hands, I CAST THEE OUT!!
Feb 21 2011
Richard Scarry is the “Kashmir” of children’s book illustrators; he’s so ubiquitous it can be easy to let rote familiarity blind you to how good the work itself is. Like any child who grew up in the 70s, I had a Richard Scarry book or two. My recent re-exposure to his work, though, is via a few books of my wife’s that we brought back home with us from a recent trip to her parents’ house: What do People do All Day? and The Great Air Book. I’ve had (to put it mildly) ample opportunity to get reacquainted with his work since my daughter has since become infatuated with those books and has asked to have them read to her ad nauseum. So, a few rambling observations:
Richard Scarry is a truly amazing character designer.
Right about the time I wound up reading Richard Scarry books over and over to my daughter, I started teaching a character design class for the Savannah College of Art and Design. This put me in a mode of hyper-alertness for all things related to character design and as I read these two books over and over I came to really appreciate Scarry as a top-notch character designer.
His animal characters actually look like animals. Don’t all animal characters? No, not really. Many of them look like “furries”: a human body with an animal head stuck on top and a tail. Scarry’s characters, while anthropomorphic for sure, definitely retain a lot of their animal trappings, which is why he can pull of such a dizzying array of odd-ball animals–from goats to hyenas and everything in between.
This goat and fox are fantastic design-wise. Their faces have character and expression and they’re walking upright, but they’re still clearly animals: they have haunches, hooves, antlers, snouts.
Another great example here. Anyone who’s ever had a cat recognizes how purely cat-like those hands and feet (or “paws” more accurately?) are. Yet this character is clearly operating a spinning wheel, turning cotton into thread.
Amazingly, even within the confines of these characters’ decidedly animal-like designs, Scarry can depict a broad range of emotions. Whereas most artists would rely on a very human-like visage “grafted” onto an animal-ish head, look how Scarry is able to show the whole gamut of expressions here on a character that’s got a full-on fox snout.
(The middle image above also exemplifies another thing I love about Scarry’s drawings of Busytown, the fictional town where these characters live: his drawings make it look like there’s a near-constant low-level explosion going on. The whole town is drawn as if it’s going to burst apart at the seams from pure, unbridled excess energy at any moment!)
Richard Scarry is a damn good illustrator. Period.
Scarry’s not someone whose name immediately comes to mind when one thinks of drawing “chops”… but he’s got ’em. Click through to the full-size image of this amazing illustration of the goings-on in an ocean liner:
This is just a straight-up beautiful cut-away drawing. Every room is packed with fun, interesting stuff and he’s done great technical drawings of things like the pistons and crankshaft cams, valves, air intake/exhaust, etc. Richard Scarry don’t play; note that the four pistons are drawn such that they sequentially depict the stroke cycle of a four-stroke engine: intake, compression, power, and exhaust.
Richard Scarry has a great sense of action and timing.
Scott McCloud be damned; you don’t need sequential drawings to depict the passing of time comics-style. Look at the amazing sequence of events that Scarry masterfully shows here in this single image:
Left to right, just like reading words on a page, Rudolph Strudel crashes his plane… which makes the food fly out of the salad bowl… both of which send the female bear bursting off to the left… which prompts the male bear to run in, clearly moving left-to-right.
These old Scarry books are sometimes hilariously non-P.C.
For the time they were written, I actually think these books are fairly progressive, but you definitely catch some things that make you double-take occasionally. My favorite character, for example, is this guy, “Wild Bill Hiccup”:
I can’t really articulate it exactly, but I’m pretty sure in a modern children’s book you couldn’t have a character named Wild Bill Hiccup who’s a raccoon dressed like a native American and who rides around terrorizing the town in his “Buffalomobile.”
All of the flight attendants are “stewardesses.” All the doctors are men, all the teachers are women, and in stories about families the dad goes off to work every day and leaves mom home with the kids. Ah, the 70s!
This image is from a story from the Great Air Book that’s all about the negative aspects of smoke and pollution, but still:
Uh, yeah…
Special bonus!
I noticed two character names that are also the names of bands I like: Dr. Dog and Janitor Joe.
Feb 16 2011
Continuing with my music-themed Tuesday Twitter #PortraitNight, here’s Tom Waits. This turned out OK, but not great. I have a history of mediocre attempts at drawings of Tom Waits. Here’s one I did at a convention for a Waits-themed sketchbook a while back. I like the diaper/”I don’t want to grow up” bit, but the drawing itself is unfortunately not great. Anyway here’s what I came up with:
If you’d like to suggest a subject for my next #PortraitNight, just let me know via this blog’s comments section or message me (@ben_towle) on Twitter.
Feb 14 2011
Well, it’s been up over at the Covered blog for three or four days, so I guess I’m safe to go ahead and re-post it… If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of the Covered project, it’s pretty simple: much as a one band might cover some other band’s song, on the Covered blog cartoonists and illustrators “cover” (duplicate in their own style) comic book covers (meaning the actual cover of the book).
For some reason, when I went to select a cover to do, I was in 80s mode. It came down to either Strange Days #2 (the one with Johnny Nemo on the cover) or the one I eventually settled on: Barry Windsor Smith’s cover for issue two of the Machine Man miniseries from 1984. I remember really, really loving this series when I was a kid. I’m sure it would be pretty painful to re-read now given the era it was written in and the general plot of the story–which as I recall takes place in some imagined-in-the-80s future where everyone plays Atari all day while wearing parachute pants. The Barry Windsor Smith artwork, though, is still really great-looking.
Anyway, here’s my “cover” of Machine Man #2 with the original below:
The original art for this is for sale here.
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