Year One Comics Curriculum, part 1

Here's the first part of what I think the first semester of the first year of a three year comics curriculum should look like. I'm pretty much giving what I co-developed at Max the Mutt a failing grade, here. I had no experience developing a curriculum, just an understanding of what skills a comics artist should have at the end. The school administration wasn't nearly as much help as i would have hoped, since their vast experience running an animation school really just resulted in forcing bad choices and excluding necessary course changes where needed.

One thing that was a seemingly minor battle I lost at the time has really been a burden on the program; when it came to simply entitling the comics storytelling class, "Comics Storytelling" or "Storytelling for Comics" wasn't good enough. "Cinematic Storytelling" was pushed on me, and, honestly it didn't seem that big a deal at the time even though I'm not a big fan of buzz-words. Then I have to include mention of film in the course description because cinematic is in the title, blah, blah, blah. It did get to the point where I'd get a call to make some revisions to this-or-that document and I just did them without thinking. After all, they were the experts in all this.

Of course, two years later the point of what the course is gets buried in the stupid title and amendments to the initial course outline I wrote and the intructor gets told it's a film course and NOT a storytelling course.

All that aside, here's the breakdown of the weekly schedule. All classes are three hours long, with the exceptions of Comics History and Digital Media, which would be 1.5 hours long each. Some classes would have homework, others would be entirely in-class work, with perhaps some sketchbook work.

Monday
Introductory Perspective
Perspective is the backbone for all realistic drawing; it’s key to building the environments figures act within as well as building manikins and the objects they interact with within those environments. The first semester would develop a perspective vocabulary and hammer home the concepts of one, two and three point perspective.

Structural Drawing
Almost Introductory Perspective pt II, Structural Drawing is a course on simplifying complex objects down to their component shapes in accurate perspective then carving into or adding detail to get the final structure. The course would start with how to extract a sphere from a cube to building elements like furniture with a collection of blocks.

Tuesday
Introductory Object Drawing
This is the first of the “draw what you see” courses. Starting with a simple block, students will develop their hand-eye coordination as well as their critical eye by drawing increasingly complex real life objects paying attention to accurate perspective.

Design and Composition
Essentially a refinement of the design and composition course I created and developed over the last two years. Students would have in-class assignments to apply newly introduced concepts and have daily work in their “design journals” analyzing designs and compositions from the world around them.

Wednesday
Anatomy: The Simplified Human Form
This is the precursor to Life Drawing I and all the anatomy courses over the rest of the program. The students would learn the basic shapes and structures of the human body as well as the fundamentals of how it moves. This course would lean heavily on Bridgman’s approach and prepare the way for a more varied range of approaches in the subsequent course the second semester. An understanding of what’s happening within the form as well as some knowledge of proportion will allow students to make better use of their time with the model and allow them to develop into more advanced studies faster. The Nicolaides-derived curriculum I had to teach these past two years is akin to throwing babies into the deep end of the pool to teach them how to swim. It wasted a great deal of time with the model, for some students it wasted nearly a whole year.

Drawing Fundamentals
This would be an amalgam of lectures, slide shows, demonstrations, hand-outs and sketchbook work as many of the core elements of drawing are introduced. How to use line, line sensitivity, contour, mass, weight, tone, media and materials, etc.. Everything from how to sharpen a pencil to point construction to how to crosshatch would be introduced in this class.

Thursday
Storytelling for Comics
I’d probably just get Ty Templeton to teach the storytelling class he’s been doing for years (I wasn’t allowed to have it called Comics Storytelling back when developing the program at Max the Mutt, it was insisted that it be called Cinematic Storytelling and now they’re trying to get films shown in the class. MORONS! Let Ty teach what he does best! Sorry for the digression. . . .).

That’s not the best description, of course. This course would not just explain the basics of visual narrative, but it would cover the entirety of comics as a visual medium. Ty manages to connect everything from page flow to covers to drawing to comics history to give the student a great foundation in comics. Short of getting Ty to teach the course, I’d have Ty develop a full textbook for the semester. Yeah – I typed his name five times there.

Introductory Colour Theory
That’s pretty self-explanatory; students would study colour and do a number of exercises to enhance their experience and retention of colour mixing.

Friday
Comics History
A broad-stroke overview of the development of visual narrative from cave paintings to tapestries to the early comics to the modern era with attention paid to specific events and people who shaped the current medium and industry.

Digital Media
The course would start with a quiz to determine the computer and specific computer software knowledge of the student, the result would determine at which point the student would start attending the class, if at all. Starting with the introduction to the magical box, the course would move on to the practical uses of the computer in comics and then briefly cover and demonstrate what programs are most often used, specifically Adobe’s Illustrator and Photoshop.

Imaginative Drawing
Every week students would be assigned a drawing utilizing knowledge imparted over the course of the week. The emphasis would be on creating the fantastic to the best of the students’ abilities at the time allowing them to see practical application of the skills as they’re introduced, understood and eventually competent with them. At the end of the course, the students should have a dozen or so drawings showing their course-wide progress over the whole semester.

Of course, effort would be made to ensure that many of the classes are dealing with similar or overlapping drawing elements at the same time so students will be getting 3 or 4 versions of doing the same thing or solving the same problems some weeks.

~~~~~~~

I'll try to have the next part up within the week, and I'll get to the questions and comments people have been sending me about the school hopefully this week.

~R

September -- Back to School

Well, not back to school for me. I miss teaching, but not dealing with the passive-aggressive ownership at Max the Mutt Animation. It was pretty hard trying to direct a program when I wasn't allowed program oversight to ensure the students were getting what they needed and the school president hates the vast majority of the comics market output. To be honest, she's essentially a cultural bigot, holding most of contemporary culture in contempt.

As you can see, I feel that enough distance has passed between my quitting the school that I feel comfortable talking more openly about the problems, stupidity and unethical behaviour I saw there. Reports from this year show things really aren't getting better.

Anyway -- you have any questions about my experiences there or what the school's really like, feel free to ask. No worries -- I'll respect requests for anonymity.

Onward!

DR SKETCHY was this past Monday.

I had a great, relaxed time drawing. The model was great fun and her costumes outrageous. I was happiest with the small one-minute gestures that night:

I've completed all my Marvel Masterpiece 3 sketch cards and Artist Proof cards, just awaiting Marvel's approval to share them. I should be able to talk about my DC projects shortly, too.

I think it's well past time I updated my comics art program curriculum project -- I'll upload year one, semester one tomorrow.

~Richard

Unfinished

Wow -- had a blast at the con, even though Sunday was real slow for me and guys in our little corner of artists' alley.

The above is an unfinished con sketch of the Hulk.

I might be able to show some preliminary work on my next project soonish -- possibly by the end of the week.

~Richard

Keiji Iwakara

Just about to head out for the last day of the 2008 FanExpo.

Having a great time -- really enjoying sitting and sketching. Well, the chairs aren't that enjoyable, but you get the idea.

The above is one of the con sketches; Anthony wanted a drawing of his favourite Batman statue (by Keiji Iwakara), but updated to the darker, more modern suit (not the Grant Morrison recently revived Batman of Ka-la-loo -- yeah, I know that's not the place. . . ).

I also got to draw Terror Inc. for the first time in 15 years -- heh.

~R

Old Stuff

About ten months back I moved my studio to a different room in my house, but I managed to leave piles of books, comics and old work behind in a space that's intended to become our library. We've been working at it a great deal lately and a large amount of artwork long forgotten has emerged. Here's a few peices I thought were reasonably blog worthy:

The dinohead-thing was some sort of self-promo piece and the asshead from Midsummer Night's Dream was some illo for an educational publisher.

One year later. . . .

My long-time friend Mike Wieringo passed away a year ago today.

I meant to start the day with a quick sketch in his memory, but doing that overloaded the process and a quick sketch took all day with dozens of false starts.

I decided that the Flash sketch would have to do, weak as it is, since Flash was the gig Mike started shortly after we first met at a New York comicon.

I knew Mike for over 15 years, spending most of that time talking on the phone for way too long every week or so. I never bother with speed dial settings on my phones, I'm kinda lazy that way, so I have a print out of my frequently called numbers -- Mike's name & number is still on it.

Jack Magic

Years ago I was invited to be a part of the initial B&W Image line Jim Valentino was starting up. This was around 1996-8 -- can't really be sure. At the time I was already playing around with a creator-owned project. I was calling it Jack Magic and I was juggling two versions of it; one a very light stranger in a strange land version and a darker version that owed a lot to weird mix of reading on darker faerie tales, Northern Ireland and video game development.

I did a few pieces as I played with it and the one above is one of them, just today uncovered from a pile of stuff in my old studio space. Family stuff got seriously in the way of my following through with Jack Magic, so the above piece just ended up on my website of the time.

Weirdly, it attracted some strange amount of attention; twice I had film producers contact me with interest in optioning the story (since there wasn't anything more to it than that, nothing happened) and I was asked by some Northern European RPG company to use parts of the image for their website and mascot.

It was a real quick watercolour & pencil crayon piece and was a pile of fun to do.

Marvel Masterworks Artists Proof Cards

Artist's Proof cardsI have two sets of 10 artist proof blanks from the past Marvel Masterworks sets I contributed to and haven't done a one of them. I'm about to get really really busy, so I want to do these before I get swamped again.
They look like this:


I'm going to do these as commissions, charging 40.00 for black and white and 80.00 for full colour. I'm only making 9 from each of these available as I'm planning to do one from each set in colour and make them available to a comics-related charity.

We're coming up on the one-year anniversary of the passing of my good friend Mike Weiringo, so I'm leaning towards choosing one of his preferred charities.I have to work within the restrictions of the regular set: no smoking, no animated or film versions of the Marvel characters, no Howard the Duck, nude versions, zombie versions or licensed characters Marvel published.

Upper Deck and Marvel will have to approve all of these before I deliver them, of course. PM me or e-mail me at richardpace (at) rogers (dot) com or something to let me know what you want.

I'll prolly keep updates of how many and which ones are available as this proceeds.Oh, Paypal will prolly be the payment mode of choice here.

~Richard

Dr Sketchies: Completely Gaye!

Sorry about the bad pun. The scheduled model was Nina Arsenault, but she was overbooked and we we got the wonderful Gaye Boston instead.

Really!

So my disappointment in missing an opportunity to draw a T-girl Jessica Rabbit was certainly wiped out by the impressive physicality and poses Gaye brought to the stage.

The drawings don't do her justice -- I felt a little off last night, repeatedly thinking slower than I needed to for the time allowed. It could have been the heat. . . .

Green Lantern for George

Here's a sketch for the manager of the Toronto comics (and so much more) shop, The Silver Snail! He's a monster GL fan, so gets a Hal doodle in his wee little sketchbook.

~Richard

The Smallest Legionaire

Woke up this morning and was reminded that I was suposed to draw a quick card for my son's best friend's birthday. He's really into the ancient Romans, so this was the result:

Would have loved to spend more time on it, but I was scrubbing colour in in Pshop while my wife and son were standing over me, waiting to go to the party.

Makes me think I should figure out a way to bring my computer set up to cons and do sketches this way. . .

~R

Dr Sketchy's -- July 15

Manged to finally make it to another Dr. Sketchy's Anti-Art School in Toronto last night.

The model was all sorts of awesome. Her name's Laura Selenzi and she's got a website! Feel free to check it out and see how poorly I failed at getting near how gorgeous and sensual she is.

Her costuming was excellent - -would love an opportunity to actually do a much longer study or painting of her to attempt to capture how ornate and beautiful the clothes are.

There were the usual drink contests -- I drew the above one when we were suposed to partner up for some sort of Batman-themed version of her. I was sitting next to people not too interested in goofing, so I just gave her comic book boobs and didn't enter.

I arrived around 10 minutes late and ended up sitting wayyyy at the back, but a few people bailed around halfway through and I got front row seating for the rest of the night!

This contest was the first of the night -- draw Laura with/as/or something with a genie. I went for Genie Jackson!
Hah!
. . .
Well, it was the best I could come up with --I took too long to polish it off and ended up not even entering. One of my former students ended up winning the goldshlager (sp?) cocktail.

Next one's on the 29th -- hoping to make that one too! I got a Dr Sketchy's link to the right for anyone interested in checking it out.

~Richard

Third Year part 2

After the set-up of knowing what will happen for the last part of third year (see previous entry) the first semester of the third year almost determines itself:

Monday
Advanced Penciling
Life Drawing III

Tuesday
Intermediate Storyboarding
Anatomy: Arms and Torso

Wednesday
Advanced Inking
Advanced Painting

Thursday
Intermediate Concept Art
Life drawing III

Friday
Illustrative Painting
Non-human Anatomy

Advanced Penciling
After the previous iterations of penciling, we get a course where the advanced practicalities of drawing for comics on an ongoing basis are dealt with. All the fundamentals must be understood to proceed here. The course load should clip along at a page a week so the homework load would be intense. Pages would essentially cover a variety of regular situations for comics artists; special effects sequences, urban, suburban, rural, and natural environments. The practical application of lighting and staging and other aspects of drawing applied to the moving camera of the artist would be explored, all with an eye to the work being handed off to an inker. Evan if the penciller never plans to allow another inker to touch his work post-program, the experience of drawing to that level of precision and finish is a valuable one.

Life Drawing III
The focus will be on understanding how the body moves, carries weight, rests as well as taking observations from the real body to enrich the student’s work as a whole.

Intermediate Storyboarding
This obviously follows up from a Beginning Storyboarding class. Assuming the fundamentals and language of contemporary storyboarding was absorbed, this class would deal with the practicalities of producing boards for TV, animation and film as a possible alternate or cooperative career choice for a comic artist.

Anatomy: Arms and Torso
I would think what this would cover would be self-evident, but my recent experience shows otherwise. This course would provide a variety of constructive methods to draw the arms and torso without ready reference as well as educate the artist on the skeletal and muscular anatomy as well as the kinesiology (how the body works).

Advanced Inking
Much like Advanced Penciling, this class would move at a page a week and assume the student mastered the fundamentals of the previous two iterations of the inking class. A variety of inking challenges would be presented, from content of the page action to a variety of artists’ styles to deal with. Even if the student never plans to ink another artist (or even their own work), the knowledge gained by going through the process would greatly strengthen their core drawing skills for their own work.

Advanced Painting
This would follow the previous painting courses by dealing with painting the figure as well as painting on location.

Intermediate Concept Art
Much like Intermediate Storyboarding this course would follow a primer on what the artist is expected to do in this field. Since many of the aspects of the current concept art field are skill specific, this course would stick to the skills most developed in the comics curriculum. Focus would be on character design, turn-arounds, prop and environment design. This course would also show how and where comics artist most often enter the concept art field.

Illustrative Painting
The practicalities of colour illustration would be covered; from how traditional to digital media are used and how to best communicate with the client and satisfy their needs. Specific assignments would cover comic covers, book covers, interior illustrations for textbooks and other books. Again, like storyboarding and concept art, this course would show how a comics artist could use their skills as an illustrator as a sister field.

Non-human Anatomy
This would be an intense overview of how animals and other creatures are assembled. Common comics related animals would get more focus (pets and work animals), but a broad understanding of how invertebrates, insects, birds and other creatures anatomy works enables the artist to inform the structural anatomy of aliens or monsters they may eventually design with a touch more realism.

So that would be what’s facing the student as they enter the September of their last year; essentially a polish on the comic skills they developed and a broadening of how they could apply them after they graduate.
Next time I come to this I’ll probably explore the entirety of how I’d like to see the second year work.

~R

Back from Chicago

Chicago went reasonably well.

Pretty much hung out doing not much of anything but watch my pal, Ethan, draw his ass off all weekend.

The news early Saturday morning of Mike Turner's passing was harsh; I had met and hung out with the gentleman a few times in the 90s and he impressed me as a big-hearted and friendly person. Another taken too soon.

~Richard

Off to Chicago

Off to Wizardworld Chicago tomorrow. . . I hope!

United Airlines called earlier this evening and cancelled my morning flight -- no reason given, but the weather looks horrendous, so that might be it.

. . .Aaaand, I like drawing the Joker!

~Richard

Starting At the End: Building a Better Comics Art Program

The Third Year

In this installment, I want to look at how the final semester of a third year comics art program could best be constructed for the graduate to best meet the program goals covered previously.

I’m going to structure all three years like this: two semesters, each 14 weeks long, each week consisting of 5 days with two 3-hour classes. This would likely be more flexible at the program neared reality, but it should serve as the armature to build the program around.

I had decided that most of the final semester would be taken up with Portfolio Development, but this will be the most atypical course in the entire program as various students will be aiming for various targets. With that in mind, let’s leave the time allocated to that until after we determine what’s important enough to take time away from it.

Professional Development would be such a course. A course dedicated to informing the student on the hows and whys of the functioning of the comics industry. Everything from making initial contacts, self-promotion, developing relationships, and publishing agreements of all the many sorts running about would be covered. Yeah, making sure the graduate knows exactly how to function in the industry is certainly important enough to take time from building the portfolio. Once a week for three hours.

Life Drawing. I expect that all of second year and first semester of third year would have more intense exposure to drawing from the model, having it scheduled once a week for 3 hours should be enough to allow continued growth.

Painting the Costumed Model. Another course that would allow the student to further develop skills and abilities introduced earlier. Thanks to digital media, painted comics are making something of a comeback, so continuing work with coloured media would be a positive development for more than just the computer colourists. I think one three hour session a week spent on a small painting would be adequate, though I’d prefer spending six hours on this.

Already I’ve taken 9 (or 12 if I expand painting) hours out of the students’ week to maintain skills support and provide career information. As far as an expected 40+-hour work week, I’m already cutting the students down to 28-31 hours to spend on their portfolio work per week. If they were mandated to come into the school three times a week with “off-days” either working from home or at the school facilities, they would get their first taste of independent work.

Our second semester could look like this, then:

Monday

Life Drawing IV

Portfolio Development

Tuesday

Unsupervised Portfolio Development
Wednesday

Painting the Costumed Model
Portfolio Development
Thursday

Unsupervised Portfolio Development
Friday

Professional Development
Portfolio Development

The end result allows for three supervised (or mentored) work sessions for Portfolio Development as well as two full days of time allowed to do the actual work either at a home studio or at school facilities. The two fewer days allocating teaching hours should result in a slightly lower tuition if only for that last semester.

The cheesy drawing at the top really sums of up many aspects of this; there's a tremendous amount of. . . stuff to cram into a very small period of time.

By taking a good hard look at all the material and what the student really needs we might be able to find a way to more effectively concentrate the information to suit the delivery package.

Next time, when I go on about this I'll assemble what I think would make a good first semester for the third year.

~R

Building a Better Comics Program

I really don't think the contemporary methods of teaching art is either healthy or developing. Institutions are either stangnant and entrenched in the methods that have been in place for decades or looking too far back in art history for a different answer to developing realist skills. perhaps, when faced with the zombie state of the modern visual arts curriculum, digging up the even older corpses of art programs is preferable -- if only to avoid the stench of decomposition.

I had never done any course development or actual teaching prior to being invited to help build the comics program at the Max the Mutt Animation School at the beginning of 2006. They were really looking for a two-year add-on to their established first year Visual Arts Literacy program. Already established programs from the animation curriculum would be plugged in as appropriate, as well. Plug and play. I didn’t know enough to know how bad those initial decisions were!

Anyway, the government forms describing the curriculum needed to be written without really knowing how long things would need to be effectively taught or who would be teaching them. Lots of guessing was made in order to make the approval deadline to announce the program for the 2006 fall semester. In retrospect, some of that guesswork was right and some was wrong. Hell, some was downright stupid.

However, now I have a certain amount of experience and I’m in a position to think aloud about what would make an effective and versatile comics curriculum. I don’t want to be a Utopian here; I want to think along the ideas of what would function in the real world so I have to start with some limitations:
A three year program.
A year consists of 2 semesters of 12-14 weeks each.
Students should have 6+ hours of classes a day.
Students shouldn’t typically expect to do more than an hour of homework per hour of instruction.

I’ll also have to start with some goals, but that raises the specter of what I consider a weakness in what I already developed. One of the big mistakes with the previous program is that the goals aren’t there. The program gives students a very broad range of knowledge and skills, but advancing requires competence in all of them, even skills beyond the actual career needs the student requires. The idea was that graduates would be able to do it all and well or not graduate. Specialization isn’t taken into account; would-be inkers or colorists would have to pencil at a graduate level to, well, graduate. Understanding how to draw and do storytelling would certainly make these students better inkers and colorists, but potentially denying them a diploma for an uneven skill set is a problem when it won’t diminish their professional status.

Another issue I have is in weakening the program focus for parachute classes. A two-semester Children’s Book Illustration class was shoehorned into the third year. I was dubious about it at the beginning. I made attempts to have the focus shifted to Book Illustration and Production so the skills would be more transferable toward comics work (designing graphic novels, trade dress, understanding type, and etcetera.), but they came to naught. If a secondary set of skills needed to be enhanced to allow some sort of back-up employment, then the options should feed the main focus in some way. Most of the comics people I know have done both storyboards and concept art in addition to comics work, or have left comics to follow those careers. I’ve done children’s book illustration, it’s a very different field from comics with very few points of intersection with the comics skill set.

With some major weaknesses identified, I can address goals again:
Program should be versatile enough to allow skill focus and career specialization
Program should offer some education in related fields with a high degree of shared skills
Students should be employable upon graduation.

That last one is the biggie. Artists are usually like quarterbacks; they get better with experience and after they’ve been whacked to the ground a few times. Ensuring a student is ready to professionally pencil (or ink, or colour) a book after three years of college is a tall order.

With such a specific and modern set of goals, I really don't think that many of the old ways of doing things can be brought to the table. Spending 20+ hours doing an exact and measured study of a plaster cast may develop a valuable set of skills for the imaginative artist, but no broad-based 3-year program can really afford to take that much time on a single exercise without being certain the whole of it develops the student in the best and most efficient manner. The skills developed by doing precision work are valuable, but the resurgent Atelier system is too cumbersome for a modern program.

I believe it can be achieved, and I start to explore how I think it might be done next update.

Stealth Dwarf

Quick doodle from a D&D gaming session (new and improved fourth edition rules!) this past weekend.

It's my pal Stephen's character.

More serious stuff again later. . .

~R

The Evils of Kimon Nicolaïdes

I'm going to start with what will likely be a slightly controversial premise; there’s too much life drawing in first year art school.

Having said that so simply, I now can take the time to put that in context; if the goal is to produce a graduate who can enter a field where they need to draw the human figure from their imagination is paramount (comics, concept art, animation, storyboarding, etc.) the ability to draw from a nude figure placed upon a lighted stage is actually of little use.

Drawing from a live figure doesn't teach you how to draw from your imagination, it enhances the ability to draw from your imagination. If you cannot draw a reasonably competent figure from your imagination, then life drawing classes a nearly a waste of your time. This leads me to talk about the much-lauded life drawing course written by Kimon Nicolaïdes and what, exactly, is wrong with any school using it as the first-step for developing would-be art professionals.

I think I can speak with some authority on Kimon Nicolaïdes's The Natural Way to Draw and how it seems to be most often used in contemporary Art School classrooms. Years ago, when I went to Sheridan Illustration, it was the primary text for all three years of the life drawing program and I just spent two years teaching a Beginning Life Drawing course built off of the book (with small portions cribbed from Bridgman and Hale), so I'm pretty intimate with the work.

For those new to the book, it describes in great detail a program of drawing from the model, 3 hours a day, five days a week for 25 weeks. The course is varied and quite expansive, often using "ah-hah" kinds of exercises to get the student to develop a better understanding of energy, weight, mass and movement and how to represent it on paper. His language is often oblique or dense and feels like a book written for a different age, which it is; Nicolaïdes finished writing it in in 1936. That really shouldn't matter since rules of usage haven't changed that much in 70 years, but the contemporary student really shouldn't have to puzzle out meaning from baroque paragraphs vaguely describing the intent of an exercise.

An aside, Harold Speed's most excellent The Practice and Science of Drawing was first published in 1917 and reads far more clearly that Kimon's how-to book.

Back to The Natural Way to Draw; it posits an environment where the student draws for three hours every day for 25 weeks. Will a student get better for having gone through it? Yes, of course, most art students haven’t done that much drawing in their entire lives previous, so just the act of doing that much drawing will pay off with general improvement. However, I can't think of a single school that spends that much time with the model. One of the best things about Nicolaïdes's program is its intensity, and no one can follow through on it.

The school I just taught at was considerably more intensive than any other I'm currently aware of at two weekly 3.5 hour classes and a 3 hour lab (unsupervised drawing time with model) per week. In one year of two twelve week semesters you could theoretically cover most of the course. We didn't, actually only covering 8-9 weeks of it, with other elements (such as drapery) dropped into another course; Principles of Drawing.

With this less-then-perfect application of the program, what do we really have? An incomplete process to draw from a live model better than you did at the start. The Natural Way to Draw doesn't do what the potential visual arts communicator needs more than anything; teach him or her how to draw.

There's more valuable information in Buscema's How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way for the practical needs of the professional artist than in Nicolïades's book.

For an artist to apply gesture, line sensitivity, an understanding of weight and mass to an imaginative drawing there has to be something to hang those embellishments off of, some sort of process to create the figure without reference. Bridgman saw this, as did Andrew Loomis, Frank J. Reilly and (gah -- please don't think this is a recommendation) Hogarth.

Before an artist can really apply the benefits of life drawing to imaginative drawing he or she needs to be able to draw a reasonably accurate manikin and that requires an understanding of proportion and structure and the ability to judge the relationship between somewhat abstract shapes on a 2-dimensional surface. Starting new students with blind contour studies and running-line gesture day one is doing them a disservice. The only students who seem to thrive are those who already have a firm grasp of the basic figure entering the school.

If I were developing a new program that was intended to meet the needs of visual communications artists, use of the live model would be limited in the first year. Instead I would have the students study proportion, structure, their ability to assess what they've drawn for consistency and accuracy, and provide them with a variety of situational manikins to be able to draw the basic figure from their imagination. A model would be used during this process, but it would be limited, and in support of reinforcing the theory.

Once that was accomplished, then a full life drawing program could commence and the students could really start to glean useful information for their future careers. I'd probably still crib things from Nicolaïdes for that, but it would be with the understanding that the life drawing course would have to be in service to the careers of the students, not in service to an ideal of fine art drawing in and of itself.

Again and again, as both student as teacher, I've run into the situation where "not enough time" was the reason things weren't done more fully or effectively. Perhaps the solution shouldn't be to cram the traditional process into a smaller window, but to come up with a new process that understands how small the window is.

I feel I faced that challenge effectively for the Design and Composition course I developed, taking what should have been a year long program and produced a 12-week course that essentially forced the student to be constantly engaged in observing design around them while they learned the simplified principles and terms. I worked backwards from the goal and developed a process that made it inevitable.

Could that type of thinking be applied to an entire program for comics and concept art? I think so and I look forward to taking up that challenge in the future.

~Richard

Process stuff

Above are a bunch more character sketches for the X&X story I was supposed to start work on wayyyyy back in January. The owner of the world's most popular fantasy role-playing game finally gave approval about three weeks back, but I am too overcommited to continue with it on the new, very tight deadline.

These are the thumbnails I did for the 20 pages. These were enlarged, printed out in blue on 11x17"paper then tightened before tracing them to 2-ply bristol board. I also built a 3-D model of the tavern interior in Google Sketchup to make the backgrounds go faster.

Been playing with Sketchup for a while now -- it's a pretty simple and versatile tool for the comics artist. Some of my pals are suggesting other programs, which I should try as well.

~R

Note --I've been asked to remove specific mention of the company who owns the licensed property and the property itself as it might mess with the contract between the publisher and the IP owner.