Posts Tagged: Underdog

Murder Your Darlings

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“…if you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: ‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.” 
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863–1944).  On the Art of Writing.  1916.

Killing a project is one of the hardest things you will ever have to do. As long as I can remember I have had ideas for stories. As a child growing up in the woods of New Hampshire I would often spend an inordinate amount of time by myself acting out the stories in my head. This was fun for me. I would go on adventures with the X-men or create whole new characters for Spider-man to interact with. At some point I started creating my own universes.

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Digital Coloring for Comics – GIMP Edition

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I still remember feeling awe the first time I super-imposed text, with effects, over a picture downloaded from the internet. My high school’s art room had a brand new Gateway computer with Adobe Photoshop 3.0. Finally, I could make digital art and I was the only person I knew who could do that. My obsession with the program grew so that by age 18 I was co-teaching the digital-arts class.

1999 was a lifetime ago. Nowadays, basic information on Photoshop is widely available. My mother can place text in an image and I routinely see 8-year-old kids who post their digital creations on the web.

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The Tools

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Be they traditional or digital, your tools are an extension of yourself. They are the vehicle that communicates story, expresses feelings or ideas, and connects you to the humanity at the core of us all. I’m not going to tell you what tools are the better than others, or whether I think you should focus your efforts on digital over print. I’m not opinionated enough for that kind of talk. I am, however, very passionate about comics. I will therefore discuss my thoughts on tools, with the understanding that these are choices that were formed based on personal experience.

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Qualities of Great Comics

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I recently finished Habibi by Craig Thompson. It’s an amazing piece of literature to say the least. The degree of experimentation, intricacy, and precision with which Thompson approaches his art is on display with each page. It blew me away! Reading Habibi has led me to start thinking about the nature of what makes a “great comic,” so that I can pass that knowledge along to my students.

Habibi

Image from Craig Thompson’s Habibi

The qualities of great comics are important to discern, especially when learning how to make comics. The following five qualities are the standards around which we at Making Comics (dotCom) are constructing our MOOC (massively open online course). Follow these principles when creating your own MOOC project.

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Standard Proportions Of The Human Body

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Read the article, then download the worksheet! It will help to reinforce this information.

Proportion Practice: Read the article, then download the worksheet!

Figure drawing is a challenging pursuit. To be competent at drawing the body you have to seamlessly integrate knowledge of gesture, weight, anatomy, and perspective. It’s challenging… but it’s also rewarding. You can’t escape learning the principles of figure drawing unless you’re making a comic about an inanimate object, so in the end, difficulty is somewhat of a moot point. You will learn to draw the human form (if you haven’t already) so you might as well discover how to love it now. Take heart! We here at Making Comics will be here to help every step of the way. The first step is learning to see the body in terms of basic shapes, and how those shapes relate to one another in terms of relative size (also called proportion).

This is not a guide about how to draw the figure. This is a guide about how to see the figure. In future articles we will be addressing the actual process of drawing the figure in detail. (more…)

Should we “Ink” Digital Comics?

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Inked linework is an iconic element of comics. Duh.

But have you thought about why? I guess because of the whole history of how the art form evolved; I’m not an expert on that. But it makes sense to me that Doré et al. etched rather than painted for book illustrations, and that Outcault et al. inked cartoons in a way that could be reproduced on plates. Pencil, pastel, and paint and other media just don’t play as nice with printing presses as clean linework does.

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