This exercise requires me to take two finished illustrations and effectively reverse engineer them, inverting the process an art director editing towards a final image. I need to simplify them and render them in increasingly distilled line drawings.
For my two illustrations I had a look through my bookshelf for anything that would be good to use for the exercise. I chose two comic books I was pretty familiar with, one I had just finished reading recently, Spider-man: Blue by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale, and the other is one of my favourite comics series, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill. I wanted to pick illustrations that had a sense of movement or an interesting feeling associated with them. I chose this panel from the Spider-man comic:
It features Spider-man giving a strong uppercut to his enemy, the Lizard. I like this one because it shows a great amount of movement and punch (pun intended). Spider-man’s fist is right at the apex of its arc, giving it this really powerful POW! effect. I felt like trying to boil this image down to simple lines while still keeping the sense of movement and impact of the drawing would be a great challenge and accurately reflect what it would be like to do the drawing in reverse. Many of the books on animation and drawing that I’ve read suggest beginning a drawing with a simple line of the effective movement of a character. I wanted to get better at doing that and I thought this would be good practise.
In this panel in Lee and Buscema’s How to draw comics they emphasize using a centre line that runs through the character to convey the type of movement you want.
The second image I chose was this panel from League.
In it, two of the main characters, Allan Quatermain and Captain Nemo are looking sort of ominously into the distance while they’re pummeled by a strong wind. I chose this image because I wanted to try this exercise on a character’s face to see if I could capture their likeness and expression in very few lines. I’m always impressed by people who work in a style that’s almost deconstructivist, using few details to portray something very raw. Artists like Yoji Shinkawa [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoji_Shinkawa] and Nick Runge [https://www.nickrungeart.com/].
Yoji Shinkawa
Memory- Nick Runge
It’s a style I would love to focus on in my professional career, and it’s always so much more difficult than people think. It isn’t as simple as subtracting random lines! In some ways I thought this was likely to be more challenging than the first image.
Here are my drawings:
I found this exercise pretty challenging. I was constantly tempted to keep adding more lines. Especially in the second more distilled version, I would find myself unhappy with how it was going so my first instinct was to keep developing the image. This is a really good exercise in restraint, and useful for my personally. I don’t feel the two final drawing were particularly successful, so I’m looking forward to returning to this exercise in a few days and seeing how it appears after a little distance.
References:
Lee, S. and Buscema, J. (2008). How to draw comics the marvel way. New Jersey: Paw Prints.
Loeb, J. and Sale, T. (2017). Spider-man: Blue. 2nd ed. New York: Marvel Comics.
Moore, A. and O’Neill, K. (2011) The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Omnibus Edition. New York: DC Comics.
Josh Robbins OCA Learning Log 