This exercise has taxed me more than any other I've done in my OCA modules to date.
Writing this, I am both relieved and exhausted.
The exercise asked me to first find a photograph that I liked or wanted to draw from. Ideally, it needed to have a variety of things in it like people, buildings and details. There are a number of copyright-free photography sites, so I looked through a good number of options, and finally settled on this photo:
Next, I needed to reproduce the photo at A4 size, and then trace it. I first started by printing out the photo and tried using my lightbox to trace the image. I found this hard as the image printed out very dark, obscuring a lot of the details. So instead I used a digital program to trace the image, which was a lot more successful and quicker:
Next, my task was to print out the traced image 10 times onto A4 paper and
"... ink or colour in your ten copies so that they are all as different as possible in style and materials."
First, I decided to try and attempt a more digital approach. In the back of The Junction (Konyu, 2020) Norm Konyu details a bit of insight into his creative process, which (after a sketch) starts with a vector illustration. Using Affinity Designer I got to work turning my first copy into a vector illustration:
The next step in Konyu's process is to then overlay layers of colours and textures taken from scanned paint swatches. However at this point, I had spent a lot of time just doing the vector image, and I started to feel very daunted by the exercise. It seemed like a massive amount of work to do ten images all in a different style. It also seemed to be a duplication of earlier exercises which have also involved tackling the style of other artists. Checking in with my tutor, his feedback was
Exercise 6 does look like a lot of work, but I think the key phrase ... is 'ink or colour'. We're not looking for 10 highly-finished fully-coloured images, but stylistic and material interpretations. Only one might need to be a highly-finished ink or colour drawing, while the rest could be a 5-minute semi-abstracted scribbly doodle approach, another reducing the image to shapes as mentioned just in ink. The whole exercise shouldn't take more than a day as an experiment in stylistic approaches
At first, this reassured me, so I decided to move on from the first image and make progress on further adaptations. I was wondering how best to do more traditional options, as my printer did not like bristol board and printing onto copier paper would end up being a nightmare when using ink.
Incidentally, I had just bought a number of comic paper sheets by Deleter. To the touch, they felt smooth like bristol but were a lot thinner and more importantly flexible. So I decided to do a test print of my inks. To my surprise, the pencils printed out really well and without any bleeding! So I printed out another 8 copies, and I was good to go.
The first style I attempted was ligne claire. Using some Tintin and Adrian Tome books I tried to emulate the clean lines. I used fineliners to help me with this, and my only real variation was to use a slightly thicker pen for the foreground to help a little with a sense of planes.
I found this approach quite natural, and I think a big part of that is Hergé's influence on my natural style. Next, I used works by Dave Gibbons as a reference to attempt a more traditional inked approach:
This attempt was a lot more time-consuming. I was really confused about my tutor's feedback, as I couldn't see any other way of trying out a style like this that wouldn't take a long time. This built on what I had learned when doing the exercises using just pens, and I started to get a better sense of where to use a brush and where to use a pen. I used a dip pen for this attempt, and I found that the Deleter paper didn't respond well to the scratchiness of a dip pen - as soon as the surface was even slightly broken the line would start to bleed.
Next, I decided to move away from inks to try and keep my interest going. So, looking in my caddy of art materials, I happened upon my water-soluble pencils and decided to try colouring in with them. I first started with tinted graphite pencils only, but then realised that my gamut of colours was too limited, so started to also include some watercolour pencils. I experimented with light washes as well as more typical pencil layering.
I stopped when I felt that I had experimented enough with the layering. As it came to scanning the image into the PC, I had another idea. For the ink images, I had been using software to digitally remove the blue pencil lines. Instead of doing that for this image, I layered the blue pencil in on top of the image, and then converted the blue to a greyscale, to try and get a sense of what it might look like if I then 'inked' the lines in with a normal dark pencil.
As I did this quickly, there are few places where the lines ghost, but I find this quite interesting. It reminds me of a technique the team behind Spiderman: Into the Spider-verse used in the film, because of the 2-D look they were trying to go for, they achieved a sense of depth by introducing ghosting intentionally. The further away the object was from focus, the more ghosting occurred. They also did this across multiple colours to emulate print registration errors. I wonder how you might be able to use this intentionally in comics to achieve a sense of depth?
At this point, I had really started to get bored with the length of the exercise, and it has stopped being fun, which I feel is essential if you want to experiment well. So as a way of just trying to be quick and to intentionally 'not care' I decided to just start one. Using my fountain pen, I quickly inked in the sign - trying not to care about it being traced, straight or correct. I realised as I moved out from that spot that I was adopting a more cartoony style, and doing it in fountain pen lent to the feel like it was a quick editorial comic or cartoon strip. So I lent into that feeling as I went, pretending that I needed to get it finished for a print deadline to try and walk the balance between speed and quality.
Feeling more resolved to persevere with the exercise, I next tried to take myself outside of my comfort zone. Doing the cartoon had reminded me to try and let go, and this made me think about another graphic novel that I had read last year. Barking by Lucy Sullivan (Sullivan, 2020) is a dark and compelling tale about mental health that I found powerful and personal. Her style fits the subject matter exceptionally well. Interestingly her work seems to include a lot of traditional materials like pencil, charcoal and ink, but is also then edited, layered and curated digitally to achieve her compositions.
I decided to try and do as much with traditional materials as possible. Using charcoal sticks, blocks and pencils as well as graphite pencils to do the 'colouring' first. I also then cut back into the materials with erasers to add reductive elements. After fixing these into place with spray, I layered in ink on top, using a variety of tools from fountain pen, custom brass dip pen and brushes. After the black layer was dry I also then experimented with adding in a layer of white ink to add back in lighter elements and to help lift highlights.
There's a lot to like here, and I found it freeing and awkward at the same time. Whilst the value ranges are not right, there was a lot to take from this, especially with texture. I found trying to get the faces done in Sullivan's style really hard, but that probably is down to the A4 size, I expect if I was doing this at A3 it would have been a lot easier.
After this, I leant into the part of the exercise text that refers to the "potential it offers you for visual interpretation". Taking this literally, for the next version I decided to use Sepia ink and fineliners. This got me thinking of those old-west photos, so I ended up deciding to re-imagine the whole scene as a western, inspired by comics like Undertaker, whose art is done by Ralph Meyer.
When I scanned in the image, there was a big difference between my sepia ink (very red) and my sepia pens (very brown) so I adjusted the colours digitally to be homogenous and added in a vignette. It was actually quite fun to interpret the brief this way.
Next, I thought about tackling my fear of spotting blacks, so I decided to see if I could learn from the approach of Mike Mignola. I started by sketching over my pencils to try and isolate the areas to be black. However, I was a little apprehensive about making inking mistakes that would have meant I would have to restart in order to recover. So I opted to try and do the inking digitally, so I could experiment while I was inking and try different options to see what might work well.
This was really challenging, and I don't think I lent into the stylistic character design aspect enough - they seem too much like the photo versions. However, I am pleased with the choices I made for the architectural elements.
My next approach was meant to start off being an attempt to emulate my favourite comic artist, Brett Parson who is the current main artist for the Tank Girl comics. I love his approach which is typically brush-only and has a humour that resonates with me. I discovered in looking into his influences that we share some of the same sensibilities with influences like Don Bluth cartoons and Jack Davis (growing up in Saudi, my comics influence was limited and distinctly American. Getting M.A.D. magazine made me feel terribly grown up and subversive!) So I started with inking and to see what I could do.
I found that in worrying about the brushwork, I lost a lot of the humour and zaniness that I was trying to channel. So this didn't end up being his style at all, but it was a good exercise in inking with brushes. Finally, I decided to use the prompt in the exercise regarding geometric text to attempt an approach that was cubist. At this point I just wanted the exercise to be over to be honest!
The cubist option was actually quick and I am very pleased with the majority of the faces.
Overall this exercise has broken me. I can't see how in any approach that this exercise would take anyone a day to complete, I have been at it for over two weeks, and have put more like 20 hours into it, rather than 8-10. The biggest thing that I struggle with is the lack of learning objectives for this exercise. It's unclear what I am expected to get out of the experience.
I can't tell if it's learning and researching stylistic options, or if it's purely to help you experiment with mark-making and materials. If it's the latter, then I think the exercise really doesn't encourage that.
Illustration students and those who like comics in particular often get obsessed with the word 'style'. Making the exercise revolve around that work is immediately going to get students. If I was going to set my own exercise to help develop my stylistic approach I would focus on two things:
What / who are your influences? There was a reason the ligne claire option was so easy for me. In learning about some of the other artists, and reading articles and interviews, I was able to trace back their influences. It might be useful to get students to draw out their 'influence family tree'
What are the different ways to make marks or represent something? Rather than pick a photo to do over and over, I think it would have been more helpful for me to select 5 common objects/people/animals and then represent them using different techniques and materials. This would have built upon previous exercises. If done in a sketchbook, it would also encourage students to focus on experimentation - e.g. what are all the different ways you could represent fur? etc.
Finally, I would then look at combining my 'influence family tree' and experiments to depict the photo.
I know that I will have learned a lot from doing all of these images, but right now I don't want to even look at a pen, let alone draw. So I am going to focus on the research task, and hopefully give myself enough motivation to approach the final assignment in a positive manner.
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