Here's the prompt:
Make a narrative that builds . What I mean by this is that the story starts quiet, and ends loud or starts simple and gets increasingly claustrophobic. Or starts with a character getting increasingly expressionistically drawn.
I went with the simple-to-complicated formula, without trying to actual change the art style.
Still working on the blacks...
I did another "doorway" strip at the SAW Jam last night.
I like a lot about this (especially panel four) but I think my faces are sort of in the uncanny valley - too "realistic" to be cartoony, and too crappy to be realistic... I need to find a way to get to the essence of proportion and expression.
The assignment for this week (due next Sunday) was to create a strip that involved moving through a doorway. I stuck with the four-panel layout and made this little PSA:
A little corny, but I like it.
I may do another exercise that meets the specs, but with a little more action.
So, as I alluded to last post, I am taking a class called Cartooning for Beginners from Josh Bayer, cartoonist and educator, through 92NY, the cultural enrichment center that is part of the 92nd Street YMHA in New York City. The class so far has been skewed a little toward the comics/graphic novel domain rather just cartoon art; it's a context I am familiar with, but I am much more interesting in actual mark-making techniques than I am in the theories of panel transition and closure. (See this now 13-year-old post.)
Anyway, I finished the homework from the first class last week, that I posted in-progress last time, complete with in inadvertent water stain:
In the spirit of completeness, here are some blurry shots of my in-class markings from the first session:
This week we worked on inking some - particularly with regard to clothing and wrinkles. I felt pretty good about some of this work:
I actually used a brush open for these last two.
And, finally, here's a tree trunk cross-hatched in Ernie Bushmiller style:
I am looking forward to continuing the class and will post more.
Here's the first homework from Intro to cartooning class at 92Y.
I'm not sure it's done yet. I think it needs more heavy blacks, but I don't know whether I want to color some of the clothing, just do a lot of cross-hatch shading, or throw in some shadows.
I am trying get control of my ink line work. Here's an ink drawing a did, swiping from a cartooning instructional book. I made a very loose pencil layout, just to place things on the page, but I essentially went straight to ink.
I still need to throw more ink on the page, I think. Here's the original I swiped from:
We'll keep at it.
BTW, here's the title page of the book the inspiration came from, a 1935 volume I am using as a guidebook:
I joined a Zoom drawing jam hosted by SAW tonight - kinda like a writing group only for cartooning. You sit and work for two hours with supportive, like-minded folks.I was surprisingly productive and had a good time.
The host, Libby, is in Nova Scotia and was telling us about feeding a snowshoe hare that was living in her yard. I wanted to practice my ink-work, and that seemed as good a topic as any, so I went with it.
First, I googled an image of a snowshoe hare and tried just a nice drawing:
I like a lot about it, although I am still working on my cross-hatching.
Then I did a little four-panel comic, inspired by the anecdote Libby had related:
There's also a lot about this I like, and a lot I want to work on.
I attended a Zoom workshop this morning from SAW in which we did a series of two-minute sketches of human anatomy. I think the intent was to internalize and simplify the skeletal and muscle structures. I don't exactly know how this will fit in with my cartooning practice, but it was an engaging exercise.
First, we drew a human torso, including as many muscles as possible, from memory:
Then we viewed a diagram for a few minutes and tried to recreate it (hence the different pose):
Then we drew it again while looking at the diagram:
Then we did a skeleton from a diagram:
And in the next sessions starting adding more muscles:
As I say, these were interesting to do...but they seem to fly in the face of some advice I just received via email from another source, which warned about getting too fussy:
...make cut-throat decisions about priorities, and stick to them. It demands that you prevent yourself from getting sucked into the "interesting" or "fun" details that leap out at you when you look at an image, and instead, absorb and capture the direction and energy of the complete figure as quickly as possible
I am put in mind of this observation I had of John Porcellino.
Anyway, ever forward.
