I’M ENJOYING my comics drawing course but I don’t want to forget the program that sparked this off, Manga Studio 4EX, so as I settled down at the end of the day I drew a familiar scene, the meadow and the wood beyond, in the unfamiliar medium of Manga Studio using my Intuous 4 pen tablet. It’s an awkward way to draw but it’s a good way to familiarise myself with the basic commands of the program such as selecting tool and colours, working with layers and exporting an image.
It’s never going to replace pen and watercolour but that isn’t the aim.
Another of the ‘action within a drawing’ exercises; a newspaper page blowing in the wind. Hmm, I misread that; I went for the whole newspaper!
THE NEXT EXERCISE that Abel & Madden set you in Drawing Words & Writing Pictures is to draw a series of actions in a single panel – and to try and make the actions flow in their logical order.
The cause and effect in this tripped up/knocks over lamp is, I hope, reasonably unambiguous as the action proceeds from left to right, the way we usually read a drawing in the west, but the next frame, the stone thrower, involves a reciprocal action so it’s trickier.
Chain of Events
I had a couple of goes at the throws stone/gun misfires/lamp crashes on stone-thrower scenario. The big problem with my solution is that the crashing lamp is the first thing the reader sees but it’s actually supposed to be the climax of the chain of events.
Homework is to make up your own scenario. Thinking of slapstick action, I remembered Eric Sykes’ almost silent movie The Plank but I didn’t find it easy to set up even the most blindingly obvious stunt in my drawing.
I’m equally clueless in trying to come up with funny captions but – phew! – the great thing is that this is just a learning experience. My career doesn’t depend on finding a solution.
Perhaps I need a more ‘cartoony’ style, as these straightforward sketches have all the comic ambience of a health and safety instructional leaflet. Of course some artists, such as English illustrator Glen Baxter, have made a career out of getting comic effect from a quirkily straightforward retro style.
ALTHOUGH IT’S less than a mile from Wakefield, Heath village at the top end of Heath Common, has a timeless rural feel. I don’t know another village that’s quite like it. It’s got a couple of big Georgian houses but it isn’t an estate village, it’s more random looking than that, but as it is almost all stone-built, it blends together.
Kings Arms Cottages, where the Heath Tea Rooms opened five weeks ago, overlooks the village green. For that matter the whole village overlooks the one green space or another. It’s a useful place to bring my mum, who can’t walk too far these days, for a relaxing cup of coffee but it would also be a good stop on a hike because it’s near the Trans-Pennine Trail and half a dozen footpaths radiate from the village.
My Papermate Tikky Graphic Rotring pen let me down by blotting the paper; I suspect that the heat of the sun was the cause, causing the ink to expand. But my mum suggested that the blot added a certain something to the drawing. If that’s so then I’ve got an additional feature for my next two drawings as the ink soaked through the next two pages of my sketchbook.
My attempt at ‘scenario 1’ in the ‘action within a drawing’ exercises, chapter 1.
IN THE INTRODUCTION to Drawing Words & Writing Pictures, ‘a definitive course from concept to comic in 15 lessons’, Jessica Abel and Matt Madden do a lot to build up the kind of feeling that I used to get when I enrolled in an evening class; a slight frisson of whoa! – what have I taken on here? combined with the delight of getting started on something fresh and challenging.
Above all, their ambitious scheme of work really doesn’t seem scarily professional and they create a friendly atmosphere; it’s like the creative buzz that you can get finding yourself part of a group of disparate talents in a new class.
Well, I’m too impatient to wait for someone to set up a course here and I’m not going to take up their suggestion of starting my own ‘Nomad’ group, fun though that would be, because I can’t wait to get on with the 15 sessions. But I’ll definitely miss the discussions at the end of each session where everyone puts their work on the wall and I’ll miss the jam comics, where you draw a panel of a strip then pass it on to the next student. I’m intrigued by those.
Working on my own, at my own pace, I’m what Abel and Madden call a Ronin, named after the masterless samurai who roamed around feudal Japan. That’s so cool!
Defining “Comics”
In discussing the definition of ‘this thing we call comics’, they point out that it’s not tied to a genre, such as superheroes or manga, they see comics as:
‘. . . a medium, just like “film” or “painting.” You don’t think film necessarily means movies about gangsters or cowboys, do you? Or that painting always depicts realistic landscapes? Film, painting, and other media are ways to express ideas—any you like. Comics is like that too. It’s a container for ideas.’
Action within a drawing
The exercises start not with a comic strip but with a single panel and the aim in the first ‘drawing time’ session is to depict five specific sorts of action. I enjoy these little problems and I feel that it’s good for me to do something different and work a) straight from my imagination rather than from referenceand b)in pencil (and they allow you to use an eraser too, so don’t panic).
In my work as an illustrator I’m invariably up against some kind of deadline, so I never have the time that I’d really like to be playful or inventive, also I’m always working for print and I generally go for pen and ink to produce crisply printable linework or, if it’s colour, pen and watercolour, again using the pen to give a bit of definition in print. I’ve hardly if ever used pencil – it can go a bit grey and smudgy in half tone reproduction – but now I’ve got an excuse to use it and I’m finding it so relaxing.
I’m working on office paper as they suggest, so there’s no feeling that I’m going to ‘spoil’ a sketchbook with a duff drawing.
I the freedom of knowing that what I draw doesn’t have any significance beyond the exercise.
Runner
I started the running figure in what I’d call a cartoon style (above, left) and soon got into thinking what props would I add to emphasise the action – a billowing coat, hat coming off his head. Then I thought this isn’t an exercise in using props or building a character nor am I obliged to draw in a slightly unfamiliar ‘comic’ style.
I find the concept of comics being simply a medium for expressing ideas is liberating. I don’t have to start feeling that I’ve got all that baggage of a century or more of comics history to emulate. Here it’s simply the idea of running that I need to focus on.
Speeding Car
Another of the action drawing exercises; ‘a ball falling’.
I say that I’m trying to avoid working in any style but, for this speeding car, I couldn’t help going for some 1930s streamlining, the sort you’d find in Tintin story or in a Goofy cartoon on how not to drive that I remember.
I’ve just finished reading Alan McKenzie’sHow to Draw & Sell Comic Strips. He’s a professional with years of experience, so his book is full of practical advice, the low-down on how the business works and the nuts and bolts of putting together a comic (he edits, or did edit at the time of writing, the British science fiction comic 2000AD). But compare his advice on drawing cars:
‘Drawing cars convincingly is where many artists fall down. Readers are likely to be very familiar with what cars look like, so you better make sure you use good reference.’
with Abel and Madden’s more encouraging:
‘If you don’t know how to draw a realistic Porsche, just draw a rectangular shape with a few circles under it: instant car!’
Exercise 4; ‘a person staggering’.
The latter approach isn’t going to get you a contract to draw the next instalment of Spiderman but I know which of those gets me itching to pick up my pencil and have fun.
Links
Jessica Abel & Matt Madden’sDrawing Words & Writing Pictures website (lots of additional resources here, if you’re tackling the course in the book)
Mirfield from Charlotte’s ice cream parlour, Tuesday.Old butcher’s shop, now a beauty salon, drawn from the opticians when we took my mum on Thursday.
I FEEL out of practice with drawing. I’ve spent my spare time this week learning a drawing program, Manga Studio EX4, but that isn’t the same as getting out and drawing for several hours. We’ve had a couple of mornings of appointments/coffee with my mum, which effectively breaks my rhythm especially as, partly as a result, I’m getting around to tracing one of the branches of our family tree.
I’m finding that addictively interesting, like a puzzle or a detective story.
Manga Studio
My attempt at the ‘Creating Your First Manga Page: A Quick-Start Guide’ in Doug Hills’ ‘Manga Studio for Dummies’.
As I enjoy drawing in a sketchbook, why should I go through the rather technical process of learning Manga Studio, a computer assisted drawing program?
It’s good to have a change occasionally and work in a different medium; I want to use it with my pen tablet, although you can simply scan in your line drawings
There’s a possibility that it could save me a lot of time on the structural side of drawing a comic strip
I had about 100 individual panels to draw for my Walks in Robin Hood’s Yorkshire so I’m looking forward to exploring the possibilities that the program offers to draw panels around each frame. As you can see, I haven’t quite got into that; Doug Hills’ Quick-Start guide in Manga Studio for Dummies shows a figure bursting out of a frame but the explanation of how to do that must come in a later chapter. Manga Studio is also intended to mask the parts of a drawing which overlap the frame, so that you get white borders between the frames, a feature that didn’t work with the method that I used to set up this page.
Dots and Stipples
It offers a lot of help with speech and thought bubbles and comic book sound effects but the feature that really attracts me is the ability to add tones and textures, which I’ve made a start with here.
It’s going to be especially useful in print as I can produce artwork for newspapers or magazines that is pure line; even the tone will be pure black and white, made up of tiny stipples or dots. Pen lines should be crisper as they’re not converted to half tones during the printing process.
Burton Agnes Hall, near Bridlington, drawn when my friend Helen Thomas spent a week as an artist in residence there.
I’VE BEEN catching up with my holiday diary for Corfu today. I wanted to write about the experience while it was still fresh in my mind but I don’t think that I’ve done anything like justice to impressions that the island made on me.
After catching up with book orders, accounts, the garden, jobs around the house and doing a refresher course on Dreamweaver since I got back, not to mention attending a wedding and a funeral within four days of each other, I’m looking forward to getting back to work on my next book.
To draw a line under a rather disrupted month, here are the meagre contents of my recent sketchbooks, the drawings that didn’t make it into my online journal.
Langsett Moor, drawn from a photograph taken on a recent walk.
On the radio today there was an article on the increase in sales of fountain pens. Some specialist shops report a doubling of sales. I can see the attraction, they often give you a more fluid feel as you write or draw, so it’s very suitable for quick sketches like this Blackbird preening, which I drew when we took my mum for lunch at the Bella Italia at Birstall. I like restaurants where you can bird watch as you eat.
The bar at the Bella Italia, Birstall, drawn with my new Safari fountain pen.Sowthistle
I went back to ArtPen, the one filled with Noodlers waterproof black ink, for these last two drawings, again drawn while we were out and about with my mum. These were drawn in my new 8 inch square format sketchbook but I’d forgotten to put a spare set of watercolours in the bag that fits it, so they’ll have to stay in black and white.
I’M STILL getting used to my new pen, the Lamy Safari fountain pen. It’s great for writing because it flows so smoothly and the slightly italic nib gives a consistent broad downstroke and fine sidestroke but this presents a bit of a problem when drawing because it keeps wanting to go with its natural flow. For drawing I’m used to a pen which will happily go off in any direction, like the ArtPen with its sketch nib or a fibre tipped drawing pen. But I think that the Safari has possibilities either for a simpler and bolder approach, aiming at the sort of ‘clear line’ Hergé used in the Tintin comic strips (yes, wouldn’t it be great if a pen could help me draw like that! I guess you have to apply a certain amount of intellectual rigour as well as change your pen) or alternatively go the other way and try for a lighter, more diffident line.
For the moment I’ll have to make do with plain awkward.
I WANTED to draw something in the garden but nothing too fussy so at this time of year an obvious subject is the newly unfurled leaves of Rhubarb. Some are still looking crinkly from recently unpacking themselves from the folded-up form that emerged from the bud.
The glossy elephant’s ears leaves bring a touch of the luxuriantly exotic to the vegetable garden, flouncing around by the hedge with the kind of grand, swaggering gestures that you’d find in Baroque theatre or Elizabethan costume.
The pattern of veins with sections of puckered leaf surface between reminded me of the river valleys and hills of Europe that I’d been sketching from the plane a couple of weeks ago.
I was intending to stick purely to line and I didn’t want to add watercolour but by the time I’d finished a few leaves my drawing was looking like a map so I added cross hatching in the gaps between the leaf margins and indicated some of the shadows from the afternoon sun to give some clues to the way the leaves are arranged relative to each other in space.
Being right-handed I started in the top left corner and worked my way across. Theoretically I could have continued in this fashion, piecing my subject together from interlocking shapes like a jigsaw but my attention soon wavered and by the time I got to the large leaf in the centre of the top row I went drastically wrong in scale. I’ve left my mistake in the drawing so that you can see that at my first attempt I drew the main leaf vein about two thirds of the size it should be and 2 centimetres to the left of where it should have been on the page.
I realised that however relaxing this drawing was supposed to be I needed a strategy to tackle such a convoluted subject so I started by indicating the main veins before getting involved in the subsidiary details.
It sounds like a controlled process but the outlines and veins make what might appear to be a still life feel as if it’s animated. I felt as I imagine a novice skier must feel if they attempt to go straight from the nursery slopes onto the red routes. A feeling of controlled chaos.
The lighting was consistent and there was little breeze and little to distract me other than a sparrow chirping in the hedge above the rhubarb.
Imitate the Action of a Tiger
Thinking about the need for a degree of determination even when you’re doing something that is supposedly relaxing, after I drew this I was listening to a short talk on Radio 3 by choral music conductor Gareth Malone who said that when he had a big performance to conduct on the way to the concert hall he would read the ‘Once more unto the breach dear friends!’ speech from Shakespeare’s Henry V on his mobile phone. Not that singing is like fighting but he feels that he needs to instill in his choir some spirit and determination.
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let pry through the portage of the head
Like the brass cannon . . .
For there is none of you so mean and base,
That hath not noble lustre in your eyes.
I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’
I know what he means because you need something of that sense of attack when tackling a drawing. You’ve somehow got to keep that ‘stillness and humility’ but also harness the controlled energy suggested in the line about ‘greyhounds in the slips, straining upon the start’. Relaxed concentration is what I usually call it, but that’s what the ‘action of the tiger’ appears to be when you see one hunting in a wildlife documentary; fluid movement and observant determination.
Drawing Pen
I used a Pilot Drawing Pen with an 08 nib for the rhubarb drawing which contains waterproof, light resistant brown DR pigment ink. When drawing botanical details I’d normally go for the finer 01 size nib but I wanted a more expressive and relaxed line here.
For me this 08 nib might be the nearest that I’ll get to the feel of a fountain pen when using a fibre tip. I tend to wear down the fibre tips before the ink in the pen runs out, perhaps because I’m using too much pressure or because I’m drawing on slightly toothed acid free cartridge paper. I soon find that I have to hold the pen vertically to get a consistent line out of it. I’m hoping that the larger tip size will enable me to draw at an angle for longer. Perhaps a proportionally larger tip in relation to the size of the ink reservoir helps give a smoother flow.
AFTER THE appropriately aubergine-coloured sketchbook that I used for our week in Greece, I’m starting a new pocket-sized sketchbook for urban excursions. At A6, about 4 x 6 inches, it’s no bigger than a chunky bar of chocolate and it has a chocolate-coloured banana paper cover.
A6 Pink Pig sketchbook
It’s literally a pocket-sized sketchbook and I’m trying to decide what would be the most portable form of colour to go with it.
This morning I took an ArtPen tin loaded with a selection of a dozen watercolour crayons but, for a subject like this anyway, they don’t work as well as watercolours. I try to mix an approximation for the grey of the sky by shading it with the lightest blue and ochre that my small selection of crayons allow.
I don’t find crayons anywhere near as versatile as watercolours. With watercolours you can add the smallest speck of ochre, crimson or blue to a grey mix to get the colour you’re after. You can then add water to get the tone or gradation of tones that you need.
Birdstrike
‘PTOMPH!
It’s happened again; a Goldfinch hits the patio windows and lies senseless on the patio. Luckily by the time we’ve had breakfast it has gradually recovered, looked around and, though we didn’t see it go, flown off.
In the afternoon it’s a Wood Pigeon that hits the window, leaving a dusty outline of its wingspan and a powder puff impression of it’s breast. The Wood Pigeons do this fairly regularly but never seem to come to any harm.
The photograph is the impression of a bird that hit the patio windows 6 weeks ago. You can even see an eye-ring in this picture. It might have been another pigeon but the eye-ring reminds me of a Sparrowhawk.
On the morning that this appeared a smaller impression, perhaps a Goldfinch appeared on the other window.
When you see the two impressions together it looks to me as if both birds hit the window together, the hawk chasing the finch.
In this over-enhanced version you can speculate that the Goldfinch had been on the feeder and the Sparrowhawk had swooped over the hedge. A moment of drama captured in feather impressions.
I’M NOT FINDING pen and Indian ink a responsive medium as I draw these Kingcups by the pond. If I don’t press heavily enough on the paper I don’t get a mark but if I press too hard on the springy nib the pressure builds up for a moment and then – whizz! – the nib sets off and draws a straighter line than I’d intended!
Surely, if I keep at it, I can exercise some relaxed control over the recalcitrant medium. The ink soon goes claggy and even during this short session of drawing I have to pause to clean the coagulating Winsor & Newton black ink from the nib.
Is it the beautifully sunny but not sultry weather that’s drying the ink too quickly or is it the shrill excited scream every five seconds of next door’s children playing happily on a trampoline a few yards away that’s putting me off my stroke?
I think that I’ve been spoilt by the predictably flowing combination of ArtPen and Noodler’s ink. It’s second nature to draw with that combination, but I would like to experiment with different mediums, which create different marks.
Anyway, time to admit defeat, perhaps I’ll add some colour later when it’s a bit quieter!
