A Kick in the Head, Part Three

Ollie Johnston said "Draw clear, not clean". When a drawing isn't working it's always tempting to clean it up in an attempt to "fix it" when, really, you know that the drawing is flawed and you should just start over.

If a drawing is rough but the pose and expression reads clearly, then it's a successful drawing. A clean drawing that doesn't read isn't worth all that much, like a car that looks great on the outside but has no engine or working parts.

A lot of people will probably argue with me, but I think Photoshop and the Cintiq has made this problem even more prevalent. The temptation is too great to add another layer to your drawing and draw it cleaner, or just start adding color and tones in an effort to try to "save" the drawing. But usually the basic pose is not pushed as far as it should be, or silhouetted enough, or has some other problem and needs to be re-thought and re-conceived. But that's a lot of work so instead we try to save the drawing that doesn't work.

I'm convinced that we use a different part of our brains to draw a rough drawing than we do to clean it up. It's much easier to be bold, draw through the forms and think "big picture" when you're drawing rough. Something about the cleaning up mode makes you get tentative and fussy if you're not careful (at least for me).

Part of the problem is that we don't get to see a lot of roughs. Almost all of the artwork we see in illustrations and comic books and animation is completely cleaned up and we never get to see the original roughs. So we don't get reminded very often that rough drawings are a viable way to work.







A lot of this "Kick in the Head" stuff bears repeating because it's tricky: it's the kind of stuff that we learn as students and we're very conscious of as we try to prepare a portfolio and try to get a job, right? But once you've gotten the job and you're in a professional environment, it's not really the kind of stuff that your co-workers talk about so there's never anything to remind you about it. And as human beings, we all tend to conserve energy as much as possible and cut corners when we can, so it's very easy to fall into the habit of being lazy and forgetting all this deceptively simple stuff. But then our work suffers, and over time we forget how to even do this stuff, and it can seriously undermine your work in the long run.

Obviously not every type of work can be rough. Most work needs to be cleaned up before it can really be finished (although I'd buy more comic books if they kept the drawings rough). But it's still important to go through the roughing out stage because so much great, loose thinking and discovery can happen in that stage. It always seems tempting to save time by just drawing your first pass cleanly but I think it can hamper your freedom and creativity as well as lead to stiff and restrained drawings.


I'm a big fan of Herge's Tintin books. A few years ago his final, unfinished album "Tintin and Alph-Art" was published. It contains several pages of his rough sketches...some fleshed out and some just a bare indication of what the final drawing would look like.






I wish we could see more rough work from great artists to serve as reminders of the value of drawing rough.

Some Controversial Ramblings and a Pretty Decent Book on Drawing

I'll warn you in advance: this post contains a lot of personal opinions about a subject that's very sensitive to many, many people:

comic books.

So read at your own risk, and please don't feel the need to e-mail me and tell me what an ignorant idiot I am and how wrong my opinions are. Because I never claimed otherwise...


When I was a kid, I never really got into superhero comics, or drawing, for that matter, so I never picked up the instructional book "How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way." I've always heard people talk about what a great book it was, and I was always curious, but I never picked it up. I put it on my "Amazon Wish List" years ago, and lo and behold, somebody bought it for me for Christmas this year.

I sat down and read it immediately. It turns out, everybody was right - it's a pretty interesting read. Especially if you're just starting out as an artist, this book could be a really helpful resource (and that's who its intended for, after all).

I never found the drawings in superhero comics very appealing, or expressive (for the most part), and I think that's why I was more interested in Disney and Warner Brothers comics when I was a kid. This page explains a big part of why that's the case: according to this book, superheroes are always drawn eight heads tall. I never really realized that before (told you I was an idiot).




The fact that the heads become so small in relation to the body definitely makes them seem less expressive, and, just as a matter of personal taste, I always think that slightly bigger heads and facial features always make for a more appealing design. But obviously comic books have their emphasis on other areas, and acting and appeal are not always their top priority - it seems to me that realism and dynamic drawing are more important in superhero comic books, all the better to make their dramatic storytelling stronger.

Instead of superhero comics, I read a lot of "Tintin" when I was a kid...Herge's characters always seem about 6-7 heads high, which is about how I find I usually draw figures. I just find those proportions appealing. It's a personal taste thing.

I always liked the clean, simple way Herge drew the world. It has a certain realism (without too much cluttered detail) because he was great with layout and perspective and clearly did a lot of research.




I think his style hits a good balance: the characters are caricatured enough to be appealing and expressive, and the world is drawn realistically enough to make the action and danger seem dramatic and exciting. Again, that's just my taste.




When I was a kid they also carried comics like "Asterix" at my local bookstore. I liked the backgrounds, I found the characters to be appealing looking and I really appreciated the draftsmanship of the whole thing, but I could never get that into it (many of the characters seem to be in the 3-5 heads tall range and maybe I have a weird obsession where I only like them in the 6-7 head range unless they're ducks or other anthropomorphic animals!). Also, I'm not a big fan of the "giant nose" school of cartooning. Probably, more than anything, it was the writing and the stories that turned me off. I couldn't stand all the constant puns and wordplay (I find that stuff tedious, not really character specific as writing, and it seems to me that that kind of stuff always slows down the story - again, a personal taste thing) and it's also hard to root for a group of guys who can whip up a magical potion to get out of any jam. I usually felt more sympathy for the hapless soldiers and pirates they beat up on their adventures than I did for Asterix and Obelix.




Really love the way those guys draw horses. Great proportions!



I don't really have a point in writing all of this, and I especially don't want to sound like I don't appreciate how amazing DC and Marvel artists were (or Goscinny or Underzo or any other comic artist). For some reason I just never really got into the DC or Marvel comics, but I was never sure why. After all, most of the people I have known who in my life who were artists and in my age group loved comics. So over the years, I've felt guilty and ashamed for not liking superhero comics, or like I was missing out on something that everybody else loved because I was too stupid to get it.

The closest I came to get into traditional comics was that I went through a period in my high school and college years where I was really into Will Eisner's stuff. Also, around that time, the graphic novels "The Dark Knight" and "Electra: Assassin" came out and totally blew my mind. Both of them seemed to transcend the comic form and reading both of them is like reading a great novel and watching a fantastic movie rolled into one.







Anyway, here's another cool spread from "How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way". The page on the right shows a drawing of each pose, and then, next to it is the same pose, drawn more dynamically.




The book devotes a good amount of space to drawing pretty girls which is always a tricky proposition. This is a good page describing some "do's and dont's" of drawing women's faces.




The book was written in the 70's by Stan Lee, who is pretty notorious for his cheesy writing style...but the book doesn't suffer for it. Everything is clear and well-explained.

Mostly, the emphasis of the book is on (as you might guess) drawing figures, using perspective and foreshortening, staging things in a dynamic way and the proper way to use pens, ink and brushes (it hasn't been updated since 1978). If you're one of those people (like me) who is always on the lookout for a good basic drawing book, or you know a young person that wants to learn how to draw in a comic book style or just wants to learn more about drawing, it's a pretty good investment at just $12.00 on Amazon.