Choices Create a Believeable and Consistent World

As artists, when we create stories in a visual medium, we control the look of everything. Every character, every background, every prop and every detail has to be designed. We have to make a choice about how each and every thing will look, and why. It can seem overwhelming,


So how do you know which way to make those decisions? For me, everything always seems to go back to the story and what will tell it in the best possible way. Each and every detail you draw can contribute to the story you're telling, if you put enough thought into your work and design it right. And if you don't think ahead and don't put much thought into what you're doing, you can undermine what you're trying to say.

Here's an example: our story (be it an animated film, comic book, whatever) opens on our main character's house, before we even see him.

Our character's house has walls that seem to be falling in and a roof that appears to be sagging. Most of the windows are too dirty to see in, but the ones that we can see through have old sheets hung in front of them instead of curtains or blinds. The house is in dire need of a paint job, and the front lawn hasn't been mowed in forever - the grass is waist high. Piles of old newspapers lie on the front step - the owner is too lazy to collect them and they continue to pile up day after day.

When we see a house like that, we make a lot of assumptions about the type of person that lives there. We ascribe a lot of qualities to them based on the way their house is kept. It doesn't have to be a house, of course...the character's car, their clothing, their posture, etc....all these things are choices we have to make as artists and each one can have a real effect on how the audience perceives our characters.

By contrast, picture a house with a fresh clean paint job with brightly painted shutters on the windows. The roof is clean and perfectly straight, and the windows are all sparkly clean. The lush, thick grass of the front yard is trimmed neatly and the whole house is surrounded by a perfectly even white picket fence.

In both types of houses we get a strong feeling about the person that lives there and takes care (or doesn't take care) of their home. We've made strong decisions that help tell our story and inform the audience about our characters.

Many times I feel like I see stories where people think "Okay, I need to show my character's house before we meet him" and then they'll just draw a bland, nondescipt house. The house doesn't tell anything about the character - it's not being used as story ammunition to tell the story in a more powerful, involving way. It's just a graphic symbol that says, "house". And it's a totally missed opportunity.

Or on the other hand, sometimes you see artists make a choice that doesn't quite feel right. For example, imagine if Elmer Fudd pulled out a rifle and pointed it at Bugs Bunny, but instead of his usual cartoon hunting rifle, the gun was a completely realistic looking gun, covered with detail and even tiny flecks of rust. It would feel totally jarring and it would take you out of the cartoon. You'd definitely be done laughing at the cartoon. You would be reminded of the fact that you're watching something made by artists that made weird choice that doesn't fit....the spell has been broken.

Good artistic choices feel like they weren't even choices that were "made", they just happened naturally. A good story where everything is designed properly just feels right, and it feels inevitable....like it's a real, actual place where everything actually exists. It doesn't have to be a realistic world, everything just has to relate to everything else properly. Everything has to be at the same level of caricature. Everything in Bugs Bunny's world should relate to Bugs Bunny. Everything in Pinocchio's world should relate to Pinocchio.


As an example, I'd like to point out something I saw in an issue of Jordi Bernet's "Jonah Hex" that inspired me to write about this subject.

First, though, here are some random pages from Bernet's "Hex" work to give an idea of the level of realism and grittiness he usually employs, which help give the story its tone and mood.

The grittiness and level of drawing help enhance the gravity and rather grim level of story telling. The violence feels like it has more weight and there's more danger and suspense to the stories because they're handled in a more serious way.


For contrast, imagine the page where Jonah is attacked by wolves drawn in the "Peanuts" style...the drawing style would feel really inappropriate for the subject matter. You'd never really worry that Charlie Brown would be killed by ravenous wolves. Just as, if "Peanuts" were drawn in the Jonah Hex style, they'd be a lot less funny!


So here's the section that made me think about this topic and inspired me to write.

In the spread below, Jonah is a young boy. His father kicks him into the sewage of the family outhouse and Jonah is forced to spend a long night climbing his way out.

Here's the particular choice that caught my eye and surprised me when I saw it: the stylized treatment of the stars in the panel when the camera shows the exterior of the outhouse.

Now don't get me wrong: this is entirely my opinion, and there's no right or wrong to this stuff, and I completely love Bernet's stuff - I always have.

But as I always say: the best way to learn is to look at other people's artwork and ask yourself why they did what they did, and what you might have done differently. More than anything, this is the method I used to learn whatever I have learned in life...it's the best method that I know to learn anything.

And here's the thing: personally I find the stylized treatment of the stars doesn't quite fit the narrative. The stylized stars are very charming, quirky and quaint. They work great for other types of stories that have more of that kind of feel. But "Jonah Hex" is about as far away as you can get from that kind of story. Particularly when the main beat is about being kicked into a pit of raw sewage (by your Dad, no less) and having to climb your way out. The sewage is certainly handled with a level of detail and rendering that sells the idea that the sewage is disgusting (a great choice, by the way). So why not handle the stars in a more realistic way to underscore the reality and the severity of the moment? Why handle them in a way that (at least to me) lends more of a charm and whimsy to a story?

Here are some pages from the same artist (Bernet) but completely different characters and subject matter: these are from "Claire de Nuit". The characters are more broad and cartoony, which fits the more comedic subject matter, and the stylized stars fit really well. As I said before, those kind of stars are charming and whimsical. They fit better here.

Of course I should warn you that if you go looking for more "Claire de Nuit" examples, they tend to be very NSFW!


Anyway hopefully you will all take this the way I intended: I am not at all criticizing Bernet. I love his stuff. But when I look at any movie, TV show, painting or drawing, I am always asking myself the same questions:


What choices did the artist make?

Why did they make that choice?

What would I have done differently?

Some people get outraged when they think you are questioning other artists, and that is not my intent. I have simply trained myself to ask these questions to learn from other artists and improve my own tastes by learning from what they've done. Agree or disagree with me on this post - that's not the point. The point is to inspire you to ask the same questions. Too many times we look at a great piece of art and just admire it. To get better and learn, we should always be asking ourselves: what did that artist do that I agree with, and what did they do that I might have done differently?

After all, that's what makes us all individual and why every artist is interesting and amazing in their own way!

Detailed Areas vs. Blank Areas

I have sometimes heard people say that they like certain artists because those artists cover their drawings with lots of detail. There' nothing wrong with that opinion, taste is totally subjective and I don't believe there's a "right and wrong" with art. Personally I tend to disagree with the idea that blanket detail is a good thing, though, because I think smart artists make choices....and covering everything evenly with detail is not really making a choice.

It seems that as a general rule, contrast is a key to creating works of art that are interesting to look at, and of course a contrast is created when you have blank spaces against areas of detail, as opposed to a piece of art that is all detail, or a piece that is all blank open areas.

I always hate to pick on artists, especially really good ones, and it always gets me hate mail, but as an example of what I mean, sometimes I feel the great Jack Davis uses too much detail. At least for my taste.

If it wasn't for the colors applied to this drawing, you wouldn't know where to look. The level of detail is really high (and evenly distributed) on every inch of the piece.

I can only imagine that the reason some people love a high level of detail is that some people like to look at a drawing and really spend some time with it, absorbing every detail and finding little jokes hidden by the artist. Personally, I don't. I really like art that makes a strong statement and one is which each area has an order of importance...I like it when an artist is clear about where to look first, and then where your eye should go secondarily, etc. I like it when artists make strong choices and direct your eye through their choices. To me, this Davis cover below is a mess. The values and levels of detail are all the same.

Here's a much better Jack Davis, in my opinion. The figure in the foreground has the most detail and the most black-on-white contrast, so my eye goes there first. Then the figure at the top left has the second highest level of detail and some black-on-white, but less than the central character. The rest of the piece has no areas of black-on-white and has thinner line work so it doesn't draw your eye until you've seen the other two more important figures that tell the story. The pile of bodies and street scene are just background that contribute to the idea, but don't overwhelm the more important figures.

That last piece leads nicely into another thought about detail...detail can be very helpful at getting your viewer to look where you want them to look.

 It's always a challenge to get the viewer's eye to go to the part of a drawing (or painting) that is exactly where we want them to look. And putting detail where you want to attract the eye is a good, foolproof trick. And so, for that to work, the areas where you don't want the audience to look need to be blank, or at least have less detail than the areas where you want them to look.

 Detail can also be helpful for indicating scale....things with a lot of detail tend to look bigger, if they're placed next to objects with less detail for contrast.

Detail also makes things seem closer to the viewer. Blank areas, by contrast, feel farther away.

Another thing I've heard people say is that drawings look more "realistic" to them when there's more detail on every bit of the drawing...but again, I don't see it that way. I've often read that our eyes don't even work that way. When we look at things in real life, our eyes (supposedly) see whatever we're focusing on in great detail, but the rest of our field of vision is slightly blurred and out of focus (and it increases more on the edges of our vision). If we saw everything in stark detail all the time we'd probably have a headache all the time (our eyes seem to work like our ears -  we filter out most of the sound we hear and just focus on what's important).

To me, what makes a drawing look "realistic" to me has more to do with proportions. Personally I always found, for example, Milt Caniff's drawings to be very "realistic" because the proportions are pretty "straight": not only are the figures a realistic height, but the features of the face are realistically small, not really caricatured (although he does have some cartoonier characters from time to time). I like Caniff's level of detail, it feels right and not like he's trying to overdo it in an attempt to be "realistic". He lets the proportions do that for him. Also, he uses silhouette in a smart way to minimize areas of detail. It feels like he's making choices and using design to caricature reality, not try to capture it verbatim.

Usually when artists draw pretty girls they don't put a lot of detail on their faces to keep them looking young and pretty. Too many lines on the face can start to read like wrinkles, or blemishes, or sweat, etc. So usually it's proportions that artists have to use to get that "realistic" feeling.

In this Bernet drawing below, you can see the difference between how many lines he uses on the men's faces and how many he uses on the girl's: hers has much less detail. But he uses a lot of lines on her hair and clothes to balance it out and so they both feel like they belong in the same drawing.

These Alex Toth pages have a great balance of blank black areas, blank white areas and areas of controlled detail. As an overall design, they're very easy to follow and pleasing to the eye because they have a good balance of blank areas and detailed areas.

Some more good examples, by Quentin Blake and N.C. Wyeth.

Design and Drawing: Simple vs. Complex

I was looking at a news story about this Frank Miller drawing from "The Dark Knight". It just sold for a record amount of money.

If you click on this thumbnail you can see a giant version of the panel.

The first thing that struck me when I glanced at it was the area of Robin's cape. It's so simply drawn - just an empty and interesting shape. There's no interior lines defining the fabric of her cape, which at first glance, might seem strange - especially when you look at all the lines on the inside of Batman's cape.

I know when I first started drawing, I learned how to draw things and then always drew them the same way each time...I struggled so much with learning anatomy and the overwhelming task of learning how to draw everything that if I found a way to draw something that worked, I stuck with it whenever I could.

When I first started drawing I read everything I could about how things were built and put together (especially the human body). When I went to life drawing I worked hard to draw everything so it was "put together right".

These are great things to work on and very important for making a good drawing. But there are other things that go into making a good drawing, and using design principles as you draw is very important. Once you start down the path of doing anything visual - anything at all - design comes into play, whether the person creating the visual is aware of it or not. So the best artists keep design elements in mind and use them to their advantage at all times.

Life drawing by Glen Keane. A good example that a knowledge of anatomy plus use of design elements to create a beautiful drawing, instead of just a record of what's in front of you.

So when I looked at the Dark Knight illustration, the blank cape seemed like a really good example of (what I like to think of as) simple vs. complex.

I'm sure there's a better name for it, but that's how I think of it.

So, logically, you might think Frank Miller would fill in lines in the cape so that it looked just like Batman's cape. Logically, isn't it strange that two capes within the same drawing - presumably even made of the same material - would look pretty much the same and have the same line treatment? (These are the type of things I used to wonder all the time when I first started drawing). But it makes a lot of sense if you look at it with design in mind - you always want to lay simple areas next to complex ones.

In other words, put areas with a lot more detail next to areas with a lot less detail.

In the Frank Miller drawing, he uses lots of detail on Batman and Robin's forms to describe them. Therefore, since the cape overlaps Batman, it looks far better to have it create a clean swath of blank area laid over his areas of detail. It works really well to create the illusion that it's really overlapping his forms and that there's a three-dimensional, solid figure lying behind that cape.

Also, detail tends to draw our eye to it so Miller kept the detail isolated to the more important and interesting areas...the places he wanted your eyes to be attracted and to linger.

And then, since Batman's cape overlaps an empty night sky, it would have made no sense to keep his cape blank and free of interior lines. So Miller laid in some lines there to describe the form (and keep from having an empty space overlapping an empty space....that wouldn't be interesting and creates no sense of depth).

There's another good example of this in the background. Where the background skyscraper overlaps the skyscraper behind it in the distance, he left little blank "cushions" of white like a halo around the foreground skyscraper, so he wouldn't be creating a complicated area of detail right next to another. The little blank areas create a little breathing room between the two areas of detail.


Like most aspects of design, this concept is absurdly obvious. It wouldn't make any sense to put two complicated areas next to each other - that would be a confusing mess. It would be hard to tell where one area ended and the other began. For example, compare the two versions of the same sketch below:

You can see how the drawing with detail on every inch of the drawing is a mess and creates a ton of visual confusion.

Likewise, putting two blank areas next to each other is pretty meaningless. Neither space has more emphasis or weight and there's no statement being made. A page from a coloring book is a good example of why this looks pretty uninteresting.

Some more examples of simple vs. complex used well. Rembrandt:

Bill Watterson uses alternating areas of detail and empty space to suggest depth in the bottom panel:

Mignola (using a similar background treatment):

Jordi Bernet:

Blank doesn't always meant white...in this Bernet drawing, he uses both white and black shapes for his empty spaces. Throwing things into silhouette is a great way to minimize excessive detail and simplify your composition (the Mignola drawing above does this well too).

And here's a look at the final color version of the Frank Miller drawing. There's a subtle color variation within Robin's yellow cape, to keep it from becoming a flat lifeless shape, but not enough contrast to kill Miller's original concept of it as an empty space within the composition.

A Quick Primer on Values

Okay, so I am working on more posts about color, but need to backtrack for just a bit here. I've written a bunch of posts about values before...but never actually posted any of them. I've always meant to talk about this subject in-depth but never got around to it. As I write about color I find that I'm talking about values a lot so let me do this post first to get everyone up to speed.

The word values gets used a lot in art so let me define it as the black, white and grey tones of a drawing.

In black and white drawings, adding tones can make a big difference in a lot of ways. Tones can be used to organize a drawing and make things clear that would be a jumbled mess in a line drawing without tone. In this example, I used tone to turn a bunch of small objects all jumbled together into one thing by coloring them all the same tone. Thus one hundred plates becomes one mess and is much easier to read at a glance. The viewer can read the dishes as one thing quickly and move on to see the figure in the middle. Without tones you don't know where to look (or even what you're looking at).




Using tones carelessly can get you into trouble. Using spots of tone that are unrelated to each other can result in confusion, much like the concept behind camouflage.



The idea behind camouflage is that lots of little spots of color and/or tone break up the silhouette and shape of whatever it's covering so that it can't be seen (much like a leopard's spots or a zebra's stripes.



One good rule of thumb is to use as few different tones as you can. By that I mean use only one shade of grey (plus black and white), if you can get away with that. Some pictures require two shades of grey. Some require three different shades of grey, but any more than that and your picture will probably won't look as crisp and it will start to get muddy.



A book I read once said that one way to have a pleasing balance is to plan a picture that is one-quarter white, one-quarter black and half grey tone (spread out over the entire picture, of course, not clumped together like this). That's not always a practical plan for every picture, though, but I'm passing it along in case it helps. It does seem to be a good balance of values.



Never forget that the eye will always be attracted to the strongest contrast in any picture. If black is anywhere against white in your picture, that's where the eye will be drawn. Otherwise, it will be wherever the greatest contrast is (dark grey against white, for example, or black against light grey, etc.).

Even in the simplest of sketches, tones can be helpful for putting emphasis where you want the viewer to look, adding graphic interest and giving a feeling of space and depth.




Also tones can help tell your story. A tone with few or light tones feels upbeat and fun. A sketch with a lot of tones and heavy shading feels dramatic and ominous.

In general black and white cartoons (like the ones in "The New Yorker") don't usually have a lot of tone...it tends to "weigh them down" and they aren't as funny at a glance. A little bit of tone makes them read well without making them feel heavy or depressing.



By contrast, if a picture is filled with a lot of grey it just feels more somber, heavy and serious at a glance.





(these are from the Howard Pyle blog).

When there are dark tones that have a lot of contrast to them (very little transition between the black and white, in other words very little grey) they feel exciting and full of tension.



Here is the same drawing in three different versions so you can see what a difference tones can make in the feeling and intent of a drawing. In the first drawing a woman reacts to a door opening. She seems startled that the door is opening but not overly concerned. Within the context of a story, maybe her husband has come home early and startled her or something like that. The situation could be dangerous but the image isn't telling you that yet.



In the second one I have added tones to help organize the information and make the drawing easier to read, as well as more interesting. But the story content hasn't really changed. The woman seems startled that someone is entering but not too shocked or concerned.



In the third drawing the door opening has a much more ominous feel, due to the heavier use of tones and the use of contrasting tones. I haven't changed her expression or the staging, and both of those things would be very helpful in heightening the drama of the scene...but I wanted to use the exact same drawing each time to show how much of a difference tones can make by themselves. This time, it suggests that someone dangerous and unexpected is arriving and that the girl is more fearful than just surprised.



To be honest, I admit that I sometimes use tones to convey an idea when I know I should redraw it to get better staging or a more pushed expression. Tones can carry a drawing even when it's not quite there (but you didn't hear that from me).

The light and dark patterns don't always have to make absolute sense, you can fake them to a certain extent to get the results you want. I find I fake them mostly when it comes to giving form and depth to objects. You should follow reality when it helps you and discard it when it hurts you...the viewer tends to be pretty forgiving, I find. If about 90% of the drawing makes sense and follows the reality of how light and shadow works, you can get away with fudging the other 10%, I would say.

Anyway, that's that, now we will return to color.....