This week: Getting the details right

Last week I was reading the new issue of BPRD, and I had an epiphany when I got to this terrifying panel by new series artist James Harren:

The epiphany concerned something about the design of the were-jaguar god designed by Guy Davis that I've been pondering for some time. This is Guy Davis' original design for the were-jaguar god:
For years now I've been pondering it's hands, and asking myself what made them seem so catlike even though structurally they're human hands. Having to really study paws for last week's entry sowed the seed of the answer in my head, and I knew it as soon as I saw Harren's drawing: its holding invisible paw pads in it's hands.

I mean, I'm sure that's not how Davis or Harren think of it when they draw the creature. Davis probably just intuited the structure of how a cat's paw looks and drew a human hand twisted into that position. But I've tried drawing it myself, and I could never seem to quite get it right. Looked at through the lens of what I learned doing that post however, it's now so clear: the resting position of the creature's hands matches the way an animal's fingers wrap around it's paw pads. Even without the pads there, it looks paw-like. It also looks twisted an horrible- if you try it, you'll see you can't really do that with your fingers, at least not that far back.

That's not all Guy did either. Remember the vertebral ridge that four legged animals have between their shoulder blades? The creature totally has that, and the line of it's neck goes from that ridge to the top of the back of it's skull, just like on a four legged animal. Because it's standing, it gives the were-jaguar a hunched, looming posture. And it's ribcage isn't wide like a human's, it's deep and narrow. These characteristics are what allow the creature to look natural both moving like a humanoid and moving like a cat, while looking like neither.

The trick with the hands isn't unique to the were-jaguar. Davis also used it for his design of the Wendigo. Again, look at how it's hands behave like a paw without the pads, allowing it to have both human and animal movements:


Anatomical details also matter when you're depicting a character who's supposedly an expert at some sort of physical skill, like gymnastics or punching or, as in the following examples, archery.

Archery coach Jim MacOuerrie recently wrote articles about 3 arches appearing in upcoming films: Katniss from The Hunger Games, Merida from Brave, and Hawkeye from The Avengers. Before you go read the articles, before I even say anything, I want you to look at the following two images and register your instant mental impression of which of them looks cooler, and also which looks like the better archer. Do it now.



Even those of you who know dick about archery are saying Merida, right? Of course you are. Just because you don't know what good archery form is doesn't mean you still can't see things like tension, lines of force, and form. It's the same reason you might not know what good dancing is, but you know it when you see it. In fact, if you read the articles, the guy playing Hawkeye is making almost every conceivable rookie mistake there is. His form is so bad that he literally could not possibly hit his targets at all. In contrast, Merida and Katniss both have perfect, olympian form. For those of you who don't know, Hawkeye is supposed to be the best archer in the whole universe of some shit like that. And here he is looking less experienced than two ladies, even to the untrained eye. To the trained eye he looks goddamned ridiculous. The author even shows an 11 year old girl looking more cool and athletic than Hawkeye.

That Katniss and Merida have correct form is no accident: The actress playing Katniss studies with an olympic archer, and the Pixar folks did their motherfucking research. With the internet, this is not hard for artists to do. It pays off not just because you'll have the private satisfaction of getting the details right: with physical action, getting the form right makes things look cooler, more badass, more beautiful.


You guys all know how much I love process art, and in searching for images of James harren's work online to find that drawing he did of the Jaguar god, I found some step by step pages on his Deviant Art page. As it turns out, doing BPRD has really forced him to learn as he goes and reassess his drawing process, which he talks about in these two examples:

Here's an older page,

and here's a newer page.

Look at those panels of Abe fighting that monster. Talk about lines of force!

Finally, I have happy news. The marriage equality comic I posted about last week did even better than it's Kickstarter goal, will will definitely be happening! I don't know if any of you donated, but if you did, you have my thanks.

Seeya next week!

The biggest event in Comic Tools likely to happen this year or any other happened last Sunday, with Jim Woodring exhibiting his enormous pen, it's dripping tip gleaming in the light, to over 100 assembled men, women, and children. Woodring found the 25 pound black wooden shaft awkward and difficult to maneuver, and eventually resorted to just working with the tip, which produced much happier results.

Okay, enough dick innuendo. (Heh, in YOU end-o.) Seriously though, you have no idea how much I wanted to photoshop truck balls onto this thing. Or make a super-nerdy comics in-joke by having the tip going through a slice of pizza.

Dick jokes aside, I really, really love that this thing exists. It's actually really fascinating to me that his learning to use this thing wasn't all that different than the process I go through picking up any ordinary pen.

He had two nibs made, a steel prototype, and then a brass-plated, hand-engraved model, seen here:

Beautiful, right? But it turned out that that nib was actually a bit too stiff, and the steel nib was more flexible, so Jim put the better looking nib away in favor of the more practical prototype:

(The brass nib in the bucket of shame. click on this image for Glenn Fleichmann's great flickr set of this event.)

This happens to me all the time, when one nib will just be too damned stiff, and I have to chuck it and move on to another one in the box.

Here you can see Jim making the first lines with the stiffer brass nib, and all the dripping and control problems he was having:

Jim Woodring - Nibbus Maximus from Gavin Lees on Vimeo.

At first he was cautiously getting a feel for what marks it could and could not make, and the frist drawing was pretty shabby looking, which always happens to me while learning a new tool.

But amazingly, not too far into the demonstration, Woodring's inking with the pen from Land of the Giants was virtually indistinguishable from his regular inking. Here he is inking a drawing with the Nibbus Maximus:

And at the end of this video you can see him inking with his regular pen:

The man clearly has a feel for the nib as a broad concept, and when you change the parameters, like size, ink thickness, and flexibility, he just has to take awhile to readjust his technique before he's mastered it as he would any other nib. It's way, way more interesting to watch than I thought it would be, and watching him have to struggle to adapt to the tool gave me insights into how any artist adapts to nib pens.

Many have pointed out that new Seattle transplant Scott Kurtz was at the event (as seen in the below photo), and I thought I'd take this opportunity to say what spectacular resources the podcast Webcomics Weekly (which he co-hosts) and accompanying book How to Make Webcomics (which he co-wrote) are. My good friend Erika Moen helped make herself a successful independent artist and businesswoman based on concepts she learned from these resources, and anyone who has a webcomic, are is looking to start a webcomic, would do well to buy the book and start listening to the podcast from episode 1.

Two additional things Woodring posted on his blog that I thought were cool, a guide to how nibs were made in the old days:

(Click to see larger.)

And this drawing of a frog being hit by lightning:

(Click to see larger.)

I notice that Wooding is wearing the exact same shirt and suit that he was wearing when I met him at an art opening, and I wonder if he's like me, with only one nice outfit that he just uses over and over at any vaguely fancy event.

In unrelated news, Dark Horse posted this really fantastic back and forth illustrated dialogue between editor Scott Allie and artist Guy Davis on the latest BPRD cover. It's a perfect example of an editor doing their job right, taking an okay idea and molding it into a great one, making the artist look good, and strengthening the narrative impact of the imagery.

Below, a special treat for you: A progression from Guy's thumbnails, to his pencils, to his inks from one of my favorite pages in that issue. Click to see it in all it's glory:

See you next week!

Linky links:


Guy Davis pencils are always good. The coolest part is he hasn't inked these yet. But he'll post them when he does. And so will I. Nick Bertozzi was made to be a teacher, and you can tell because when he's interviewed, just talking how he normally talks he's teaching left and right. Go read this thing.

Jillian Tamaki process shots. This woman throws out more good ideas in a week than I have in a year.

Evidently it's kind of a thing now for people to build their own Cintiq-style monitor tablet. No, really. Links:

Here

Here

And a video of such a creature in action:



I know, right?

This week: Using Light
(Click on small images to see them big.)

I think the title image says all there is to be said about tracing, right? Does anyone not know how to trace with light? You take a sheet of paper with a drawing on it, stick it behind a piece of paper you'd like that drawing to be on, shine a light through the back and draw on the top sheet. You can use a light box, a computer screen set to maximum brightness with a pure white screen, or a window on a sunny day. We're all good on that use? Then let's move on to studio lighting.

Some of what I'm about to say is really obvious once you know it, but unless it occurs to you or someone tells you, it can cause huge problems. Here's the most important thing: you want your drawing lamp, or whatever your lightsource is, to be OPPOSITE whatever side your drawing hand is, as seen below in Fig 1. If you don't have a light source you can move, then move your table. Fig 2 shows why this is so important: if the light is shining from behind your drawing hand, it will cast a dark shadow that will obscure your lines and make it very hard to see what you're doing. Fig 3 shows how placing the light opposite your dominant hand casts the shadow in back of your hand where you're not looking. You can even see the tip of your drawing tool! I'm gonna make an admission here and say that it was sophomore year of college before I learned this. By sheer chance I'd been placing my lamp correctly for years, but with my new school setup I'd gotten it wrong and it was giving me trouble. I think it was Jessica Abel who taught me how to place the lamp correctly, and bless her, I don't recall her cracking so much as a derisive smirk about it, as obvious as it must have seemed to her. She's a great teacher.

Now, some folks claim that a single incandescent bulb vibrates almost imperceptibly and causes eye strain. I've never had a problem with this, but if you feel yourself getting insane eyes (fig 4.1), I've heard it recommended that you either get two light bulbs to cancel each other's vibrations out, or buy a lamp that has both an incandescent and fluorescent bulb. I can't stand fluorescent lights at all, but it seems to help a lot of folks I know. The important thing for me is that the light be one of those daylight bulbs that cast a white light instead of a yellow light. That's what it takes to keep my eyes sane. (Fig 4.2)

Now, a couple of posts ago in my manifesto for this blog, I wrote about the kinds of tips about craft that can be taught quickly, learned instantly, and instantly improve anybody's work regardless of skill level. These little tips and tricks may not be physical tools, but they are mental tools that everyone needs in their mental toolbox to help them do what they do better, so I feel they belong on the comic tools blog. Here's some basic ones about light and shadow:

- Generally, thin lines facing the light source, thick lines facing away.

-Generally, when you don't have some strong light source contradicting this, shadows should go under things, on the undersides of things, and on things that are in back of other things. (Someone walking might have the back leg blacked in, for instance.)

-Trying to draw a cast shadow by tracing the outline of the object and then using that to make the shadow looks like shit 99.999% of the time, and I can always tell. I know it seems like a shortcut, but so is having your hair cut by a lawnmower.

-Fig 6 and Fig 7 show two ways of drawing shading on an object with a light source to the left of it. Neither of them is better than the other, but you have to know when to use them and why. Fig 6 shows hatching blending from the light side to the dark side, which is totally black. Fig 7 shows the hatching going from the light to the dark side, but it also shows the reflected light on the edge. If you look closely at the edge of an object with a strong light cast on one side, you'll see that the darkest part of the shadow isn't actually on the opposite side, as you might logically expect, but rather it's just before the edge. The edge is slightly lighter. That's because to your eye, the abrupt cast shadow contrasts strongly next to the light side, but once you're looking at the shadow side the light already in the environment, however dim, lights that dark side ever so slightly. That edge of muted light can really save your ass when you have to draw something against a black background. Fig 8 shows regular black shading with no reflected light, and as you can see, everything shaded disappears. The entire right side disappears, and the shape is impossible to discern. Fig SUCK shows a common, shitty solution to this problem, which is to draw a white space around everything you draw against a black background. I don't give a shit HOW many professional, published comics you see doing this. A lazy, shitty shortcut that pros use is still a lazy, shitty shortcut. It takes a few second's extra thinking to do it right and if your comics don't mean enough to you to do that, please throw your pages down a well and break your fingers with a hammer. Fig 9 shows the simplest solution to the problem, which is to represent the reflected light by stopping your shading just INSIDE the outline on the shaded side. This works especially well for people who don't hatch, actually- it's clean and smooth and graphically useful, allowing you to distinguish flat shapes from a background with no modeling. If you do hatch, though, it looks a little too smooth for some materials. If you need to soften it, you certainly can , as Fig 10 shows. In fact, if you want to start playing with the hatching itself, and maybe start interrupting the edge of the reflected light, you can really start getting some wild textures. I was going for some sort of pitted stone with Fig 10. Finally, a note about drawing black things: don't draw them entirely black. Black objects, even very. very black objects, always have some lighter bits and darker bits. Go look at your black pants, or your leather jacket, say. Drawing those shadows not only tells your reader alot about that material, it also makes it look MORE black, oddly. Filling in a black suit totally black is another shitty, lazy shortcut that pros use all the time and shouldn't. If your comic has really simple, graphic charaters, solid spotted black clothes might be acceptable (although I'd encourage you to design the simplest of characters with some highlights on their blacks, even if it's just some white on top of the shoulders) , but you'll still have to contend with putting those characters over a black background, or having a black-sleeved arm cross over a black chest. You'll probably need a white line of some kind then, and if you remember what I've just told you about lighting, that white line will look natural and unobtrusive, instead of making the reader go "Oh, wow, I guess that guy never planned for that character's arm to go over their chest, huh? EEsh."

I'll conclude with a few selected panels from Gabriel Bá and Guy Davis that embody the principles I've been talking about:
Next week's tool: Pointed Sticks.