The thing about monsters is that okay, yeah, sometimes they prowl around slavering and growling and they do strike menacing poses, but they also get itchy, roll on the ground, paw things over, stretch, investigate, and eat. I like seeing monsters doing those things as well as menacing people - it suggests that they’re actually creatures instead of props.

The same thing goes true for characters, too. Okay, yeah, characters do look appealing and play to camera and hit great poses and have dialogue carefully crafted to move the story forward. They take on a whole new dimension when they want things, though, and are the stars of their own story even if they may be only passing through someone else’s story to drop a line or two of dialogue. When they have wants and needs and some show through, it’s like seeing a rancor fussing with some dirt in the corner of his pen.

It’s all about feeding the imagination.

You can translate the behavior of dogs, cats, squirrels, any kind of animal into monster behavior. You’ve got to understand the animal’s motivation in order to give it to your creature, but it’s all there.

Filed under: monsters, thoughts on art, sketching — Emma @ 9:08 am

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This is something I’ve been thinking about recently.

Probably the first lesson I learned in working at Pixar was that when you lay your work on the table in front of your story head, or your production designer, or your director, either it’s there, or it’s not. The thought process through which you went to come to this point, drawing, handling of a scene… it’s not something to explain, or argue. It doesn’t matter. If your thought processes are not clear in the drawing itself, in the scene, if you need to be in the room to say “hoop yeah let me tell you what’s happening there,” the art you’ve produced is just not effective.

It can be frustrating, because while it’s true that you’re drawing ideas, not pretty drawings, a sloppy drawing can make your good idea seem bad. If you’ve got this awesome robot locomotive and you’ve figured out what each gear and component actually DOES, it’s no good to draw a diagram for your pitch. Step one is always the feel - once people are convinced that it’s a good and appealing idea, that it feels good, then you go in and work out the hows (and you’ve probably already got them in your head). But for a pitch, for an okay on the idea, it has to be just the idea. Robot locomotive. How do you communicate that in a way that is basically a siren song to your supervisor?

Drawings have to be clear and appealing because you never want to hear ‘no’ about a drawing. You want to hear ‘no’ about an idea.Think of it this way: the movie is the final product. Nobody is going to be in the theater explaining to the audience, “what you’re seeing here - and it’ll be here later - is a real thoughtful scene.”

Here’s a drawing for good measure. The kid from my Afterworks story.

Filed under: afterworks, thoughts on art — Emma @ 12:16 am

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The amazing Derek Thompson, of 365 Monsters fame (if not fame, definitely recognition for admirable achievement: publishing a book with a monster for every day of the year) had a copy of Dream Worlds, Hans Bacher’s production design book, which he was kind enough to let me rifle through. People are reviewing it, and some are saying that it’s more of a personal art book than a production design book. It doesn’t seem to me like a personal art book (no naked women, for one thing), but it may be a better book for story artists than people wanting to do production design.

Aside from explaining the basics of camerawork - the 180 rule, common ways of shooting conversations, what long-medium-close ups are - Hans really explores what your options are in shot composition. He encourages reference from films, with a list of good films and directors for lifting comps from. The book also has pages on pages on pages of his own comp thumbnails, comp thumbnails from the films he’s worked on, and thumbnails drawn from other films.

Great book, and completely worth the $25 or so, for noob story people like myself, and probably for noob comic artists, too.

What I got out of it: shape, and details versus patterns. If the shapes, the big sections of tone (back to that greyscale thing again) are working, then you want to take your picture further, finish it. You have to keep the values the same as you take it to color, though, and resist the urge to put detail all over it.
A pattern (even an irregular pattern) - tree bark, wallpaper, etc - will read as tone, because your brain can’t deal with such a compact grouping of individual lines or shapes.
If a pattern translates into tone, a detail translates into contrast. Contrast draws your eye.

I read that, and put it together, and a kind of mushroom cloud fueled by revelation alone came out of the top of my head as I remembered all the times I’d meticulously detailed the paws of some animal, or the leg armor on some guy, not realizing that I was drawing the eye there. I thought I was giving it more character. I HAD figured out that more lines in the face make you look there, but oh well. Fortunately I usually haven’t got the patience to detail the right thing, let alone the wrong one! You learn things from good books.

There’s another post in me about how tone, shapes, patterns, and details work in relation to story, too. It seems like most art principles can translate back into story… if you twist them and reinterpret them enough. I could probably cook on the basis of tone, shapes, patterns and details… except that if we’re gonna say cooking is art, everything I make is probably super-enthusiastic finger painting.
That Post Is For Later.

To illustrate my point on shapes and details, go look at Andrew Shek - he knows what he’s doing. Half the time his animals are big appealing shapes, with detailing around the face and feet controlling where your eye goes.
Dani Strijleva is also really good at this - turning her characters and even life drawings into shapes and picking out where to put her details. She has a painting of a carousel, which is absolutely perfect layering of shapes. I didn’t get it at all when she said she figured out shapes and then layered them… now I do. Woo!

And because art is cool, me trying to use shapes and kind of failing miserably.

The arms are kind of crap, and could be reworked to be more appealing and gorilla-y. Also when coloring, I forgot about the big lines in the sketch, and forgot that in line drawing, a line = change in tone. If I’d followed the grey drawing for his upper arm, I would have ended up with a beefier, manlier gorilla.
Happy with the back feet, though! If you can see ‘em. The colors were much lighter on the cintiq.

Filed under: thoughts on drawing, animals, artists, thoughts on art, photoshop — Emma @ 1:23 pm

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Returning from Comicon, I always am sad to see only regular people on the street and no stormtroopers, Klingons, or Hogwarts students. I am happy though to have access to vegetables and unfried food, and a bed of my own that I won’t feel guilty for kicking anyone out of. It’s a bittersweet return… but the lists of comics and artists newly discovered will keep me going until next year.

Some things that I was excited about finding:

Volunteer, by Muriel Sevestre and art by Benoit Springer. The linework is completely beautiful, and the expressions and poses and environments and clarity of storytelling are just basically dumbfounding. It’s a bande-desinee, so it’s all in French, but the story and characters are clear through the artwork… so now I have something new to be intimidated by while I work on my short comic.
You can find Volunteer at Stuart Ng along with tons of other stuff to spend money on and be inspired by (or whacked in the butt by maybe).

Notes for a War Story, by Gipi. Gipi is an Italian doing comics and illustration, and he has a blog and a bunch of pirates. I like how he draws, how he stages things and just puts down what’s there instead of going and constructing everything. There are some American comics that I have that I love and that are engaging in story and art, but you could pose and take photos of action figures instead of the drawings and there would be no real difference… I like to see it when artists try and maybe get it wrong but maybe get it right. First Second has translated and published two of Gipi’s books - the other one is Garage Band.

Finished off the con on Saturday afternoon with the JMS panel… I like listening to JMS because he’s gracious towards his fans and honest about his process. I assume he’s honest about his process, anyway - he says he’s written 10 pages a day since he was 17 years old (excepting birthday, Christmas, and what… New Year’s?), and while I don’t know that I strictly believe that, I do believe that when you look at it statistically, he probably has written 10 pages a day more days than he has not. The message that some artists give to their fans’ questions imply that talent and inspiration are what’s behind their success. JMS beats into everyones’ head that it’s just DOING IT, practicing and continuing to write (or draw, or do anything) when you would maybe rather watch TV, or when you feel kind of sick, or when you would like to be sleeping in.
I think he’s right. He seems to be right. I don’t think inspiration really has much to do with it. You think things up that would be interesting, and then you draw or write about them - and when you can’t think of anything to draw or write about, you just draw or write and something will come out, even if it’s terrible.

JMS says it better.

Train drawings:

Comments are now working - so you can be all “haha b5 blows, bsg rulez” or “you are so awesome you should be President of pretty much the entire world,” or “invisible bicycle!”… you know, whatever.

Filed under: Comicon, thoughts on art, faces, sketching — Emma @ 11:54 pm

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I was sketching this morning, doing warmup sketches, and I was noticing how little stuff, like the tilt of a head, communicates a lot. It also seems like head tilts, turns, and looks up or down make the drawings come to life. I think those things definitely make the drawings more interesting. So I said hey I bet I can write a post on it, and sound like I know what I’m doing, and like people should listen to me! I’ll do some samples!

Also, some sketchcrawlers went to see Harry Potter 5 last night, and it was pretty great. They packed a lot of stuff in and left a lot of stuff out, but it was one of the better performances out of Daniel Radcliffe and the end was just fantastic.

So I drew Harry Potter talking to his bud Snape, to illustrate my point of head tilts being better and more interesting. Then I discovered that my point really wasn’t valid, because each of the following drawings, instead of getting progressively more boring like I thought they would, just communicate different things. Whaddya know?

Subtext: “My dad did WHAT?”

Subtext: “You can’t get away with this, Professor! Sooner or later YOU WILL PAY!”

Subtext: “Holy degreasifyin shampoo, Batman!”

So… failed hypothesis, but interesting discovery. I guess the point that I can pretend I was trying to make from the very beginning is that all these things communicate different things, just in how a character orients himself to another character, and it’s good to mix it up and use them to drive home your points. Now that I look at it, Snape should probably have been oriented away from Harry and looking back at him, not facing him… more in character, I guess.

Filed under: harry potter, storyboarding, thoughts on art, sketching — Emma @ 11:01 pm

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Towards the end of June my apartment became something like a train station. People (and frogs and cats) in and out and staying and leaving and bringing stuff and leaving it or taking it too. Once that stopped and everything got settled again, stuff kept on arriving, so it’s not so much of a train station as it is a storage locker. There are boxes everywhere, cats eating potted plants and destroying stuff, and a frog in the closet.

It’s hard to draw in a train station or a storage locker.

Also, when you draw all day at work every day, it’s easy to start to think about just watching a movie or drooling around on the internet when you get home. You’re keeping your skills up at work, right? And then you sit down and try to draw your own stuff, and it looks like someone ate a bunch of how-to-draw books and then barfed on the page. You sit there looking at the cliched overdrawn crap and then hunker down to draw through the pile of bad drawings that have amassed.
Or maybe it’s just me…?

I keep forgetting to not draw pretty. When you draw pretty, everything looks the same… it’s better to draw honestly, and then the beauty springs out from unexpected places. It’s also easier to get character in honest drawings, because when you’re not worried about making the face beautiful, you can get more interesting expressions.

This is the girl from Gosford Park and a guy who ended up looking like a waiter from Ratatouille. If you haven’t seen Ratatouille, you should go. The performances from all the characters (and actors) were amazing, everything is beautiful, and it gives you interesting story turns… awesome altogether. Go see it.
If you haven’t seen Gosford Park, see that too! You’ll have to watch it twelve times to figure out what the heck is going on - it’s very much a window into another world, where everyone has pasts and (most of them have) futures. Plus it’s got Clive Owen, Maggie Smith, and Kelly MacDonald.

Filed under: films, thoughts on art, faces, photoshop, sketching — Emma @ 10:49 pm

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So much of art is how you approach it. So much of anything, really, is how you approach it. I tried skateboarding a while back, because although I didn’t really have the requisite physical coordination, everyone else sure did look awesome skating around and stuff. I approached it carefully, overanalyzing and going really really slow on the skateboard, because I didn’t want to fall off or look like a dork… nevermind that’s what I did.

I went down to CalArts to visit and crash the job fair in May, and I talked to my friend Roongrit, who had been there for the two years after I’d dropped out. He said it was really interesting and frustrating seeing everyones’ work at the job fair, because the artists whose work was the best, whose work was attracting prospective employers like fangirls to Johnny Depp, most of those were the people who didn’t need to support themselves, and didn’t agonize over everything. They just sat down and drew and drew and drew, drew whatever they felt like and if they got something interesting they went and drew that, not worrying over whether it would ever sell or not. On the other hand, in the portfolios of the people who were really broke, who were work-studying or working other places, who had to work to eat, their work was targeted towards the employers and so it just all looked the same.
It was interesting, and kind of sad. The people with the surplus of time get the options, and the people who are pulling themselves along by their teeth (on asphalt), they budget their time so that when they sit down to draw, they absolutely MUST TURN OUT A PORTFOLIO PIECE or their portfolio will be EMPTY and they will never get a job.

Figuring out how to keep it interesting, keep it fun, and not kill myself over whether it’s a portfolio piece or not has made me a lot more relaxed this past year… mostly.

Here’s a quick coloring job. I saw Guy Davis’s drawings in the BPRD books, and the way Dave Stewart colored it makes me want to learn my stuff and start coloring.

Anyone going to San Diego Comicon? I’ll be down there, hopefully if everything works out, with some sketchbooks (not the kind that I draw in, the kind that already HAVE my drawings IN them).

Filed under: sketchbook, Comicon, calarts, thoughts on art — Emma @ 6:14 pm

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I was going to title this “the right way to draw”, but it’s not really. I was thinking about how sometimes I come across pictures where the anatomy is just off, but it looks like the artist really does know what they’re doing. I’m always puzzled by these - at Wondercon I saw this huge poster of a guy riding a horse, and one of the joints on the horse’s front leg (only ONE leg, the other was perfectly fine) was backwards. Its wrist/knee had turned into another elbow, or a hock or something.
It was just so weird and jarring - the rest of the horse looked like the artist knew how to draw it. The other front LEG looked right. What had happened? Did he have reference for the rest of the pose, but not that leg? Did he just have a brainfart? Did someone else dislike how his pose looked and fix/maul it themselves?

And that got me thinking. I noticed it immediately because I’ve been drawing horses forever, and have always tried to learn more about how they’re built, how they move, etc. So I guess when a horse is drawn weird, it really jumps out at me - because I know the shapes so intimately. I may not be able to always get it right in my own drawings, but I can tell when it’s weird.
But I wonder, can people who don’t pay attention to horses tell if it’s drawn weird? Something like putting knees instead of hocks on the back legs, that’s probably immediately noticeable by anyone. Or is it? I read misspelled words all the time, just skimming over them and not realizing until maybe the third time I read it that it’s spelled “thrid” instead of “third” - I understand what it’s supposed to be, given the context, and I don’t pay any attention to the mistake.
Do non-artists (and artists, too, I guess) scan images like that? Identify the elements that say “horse” to them, and not notice the rest?

Just thoughts. AND NO PICTURE… oh noes.

Filed under: thoughts on art — Emma @ 6:13 pm

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So much of everything is just doing it. You can’t get good at playing an instrument without actually playing it, and it sounds absolutely awful until you get good enough to make it sound less awful. That’s like the saying, “there are a million bad drawings sitting there inside of you, so you better start drawing now to get them out.” It’s true… but it’s not like a queue, bad drawings to the front of the line, good drawings stay in the back. Every fifty, or twenty, or so, a good drawing sneaks in.

That’s what I think. It’s not so much drawing the five billion bad drawings you have lurking in your fingertips, it’s practicing enough so that one in five, or possibly one in two, is a good one.

Out of five pages of faces, this dude is IMO the good one in thirty.

Filed under: thoughts on art, sketching — Emma @ 5:58 pm

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Another plug for the Invisible Ink Blog… this time about his most recent post. In the post he talks about how great artists copy, steal, rip and paste from other artists, and how that’s a valuable learning tool.

I read that and it pissed me off. It’s always been a kind of a thing for me, saying “I never copy, I’m never Directly Inspired by, what I produce is my own and if you can look at it and even think that I ripped somebody off, I’m going to burn it, because if I’m not producing Emma drawings, then I’m a hack.”
Which is a really long thing to say every time you draw something.
Anyway, I read his post and it set off the knee-jerk reaction. Because, you know, ripping people off is what hacks do; it’s ridiculous and it short-changes you because if your drawings are always just grafts onto the larger tree of someone else’s work (check it out, a metaphor), how do you ever know what you yourself are capable of doing? I posted a comment to that effect on his blog, and he explained that it’s not ripping the artist off, it’s basically study.

That’s a lightbulb moment. I lock all the other artists I love into the closet when I sit down to draw something, and that just busted the door off its hinges. I did a couple of pages of Mike Mignola studies, and a couple of pages of Bill Peet studies, and it’s amazing to go through the process of figuring out why the shapes are drawn that way. You HAVE to do the study in some way approximating the way that the artist did it - it’s no good to to pencil in the volumes before you start methodically inking your sketch from Bill Peet ref, you have to take a pen and draw it straight. So you have to figure out what those lines are there for, what got drawn first, what are the anchors and landmarks and what the drawing actually means. I was also catching a lot of my own habits, which I hadn’t even realized I HAD… but trying to draw like someone else, my own inclination on where to put the eyebrows got in the way (even when I was looking straight at the source drawing).

So anyway, I’m not going to post my studies because that’s ridiculous. Here’s a tiger, instead.

Click on it, cause sizing it any further down made it lose all its awesomeness. And it won’t all fit on the page! O NOES

Filed under: influences, thoughts on art, observational vs imagination — Emma @ 5:36 pm

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