Is it time to blog already? Where does the week go? Let’s discuss.
We were playing Telestrations at game night last Tuesday (think a mix of the telephone game and Win, Lose or Draw) and somebody commented that they thought I drew well (hilarious when you look at how quickly the game requires you to sketch anything) which got me talking about my art. It’s not something I typically talk to strangers unless it comes up naturally in conversation (“What are your hobbies?” and the like). I talked a bit about the process I go through to draw and it was all very positive and reaffirming. Good stuff.
Talking about the process got me thinking about the process and different ideas came to mind as I was drawing this week. It’s been a while since I’ve talked about drawing (I think) so I thought I’d talk about it a bit.
In an interview for the Peanuts movie, one of the animators related a story of how Charles Schulz went to Bill Melendez to say he didn’t like some of the animation cels because they looked bad. Melendez replied, “Okay. Then show me how you would draw it.” Schulz said, “Well, I wouldn’t draw them in that position,” and a light went off in his head. He understood. The in-betweens might look weird, but they were necessary to get from point A to point B. This story came to mind as I was drawing a panel which showed Cyran in the full-face view. It looked off. This was weird to me because when I first started it seemed I could only draw my characters in the full-face view. As time went on, I started using and refining a three-quarters view which seems to have become my standard to the point where it’s the way I’m most comfortable drawing everybody.
The view I use for the faces affects how I will stage a scene. How I stage the scene affects how I draw the faces, or more particularly, the eyes. If a character is looking ahead, I’ll use a dot for the eyes. But if they’re talking to a character who’s beside them in a panel, the dot doesn’t work so I’ll draw something that looks like an apostrophe. If the character is looking at someone taller, it’s a normal apostrophe. The orientation matters or else it might make it look like he’s rolling his eyes instead of looking up. If the character is looking at someone shorter, it’s an upside-down apostrophe.
Lately, I’ve been trying to change things up a bit. Drawing two characters side by side, panel after panel, gets a little boring, not to mention tedious. It’s hard to resist the temptation to copy panels when there’s no action from panel to panel. The more characters in the scene, the greater the temptation. By trying different character layouts, I keep things more interesting to draw, but since I use these layouts so infrequently, they really stand out.
A big change that’s coming is that I’ve switched from a portrait to landscape when laying out my panels. It started with me wanting to draw a four panel strip with the third panel being large but not the fourth, which isn’t possible in the portrait view. I tried laying the page on its side for the strip and it worked. At first it was only going to be for the one strip, but I thought it might look weird so I tried keeping the landscape orientation for a few strips to find out that I actually like it better that way because the panels feel bigger. You’ll start seeing the new pages next Thursday.
A whole blog post just about drawing comics? It hardly seems possible, yet here we are at the end and I’ve stayed on topic the whole time. Nice, but that’s all for now. I’ll probably be back to talking about board games next week. Until then, have a good seven and we’ll do this all again next Monday. Carja V.