THE SIMPSONS NEWS

I’m back on SIMPSONS show 500  this week. This time around I’m doing board revisions.  Seems the screening of the show went real well.  Act 1 (which was my act) was assigned back to me to revise and it turns out the rewrite on it was very slight.  So slight in fact, that I finished revising it yesterday (Wednesday). That doesn’t happen too often.  Today I’ll be working on my section of Act 2 as well as the rest of the Act.

The revisions for Act 2 are a little more involved but perhaps not too involved because my director also assigned me almost of all Act 3.  Here’s hoping I can get most of Act 2 done by the end of the week.

VIDEOS

Wednesday of this week, I accompanied my co-workers to the comic book store during lunch.  Later, while my friends looked through their comics (I didn’t buy any) as we eat lunch, we started talking about the comic artists we liked.

One of them was Sean Gordon Murphy. Later, when we got back to work, my friend Paul sent me a link to the video below of Sean Gordon drawing only with ink and a brush.  It made us want to shoot ourselves. He’s too good. Enjoy:

ART

So if you’ve read my earlier posts on this blog, you known that I’m going through one of those artist growing periods where I’m about to learn something new and become a more well rounded artist but BECAUSE of this, my work has now become worse.  This happens to all artist all the time.  Once it’s happened to you enough times, you recognize what it is.  It’s best at a time like this to just enjoy the process even though the work you produce is lousy.

As I’ve struggled through this time, I realized it would be best to talk things over with my friend and “Art Sifu” Paul Wee.  I wanted to run some thoughts by him about what I was doing wrong and how to handle them. There were two big questions really wanted answers to:

1. Why did everything I draw look cartoony?
2. What, if any, details should I put in the shadow area?

To get to this point I basically showed Paul all  the work I’d done and told him how I’d been tearing my hair out over it.  During the conversation, the realization came out that I thought of myself as a trained cartoonist than an illustrator, while Paul, thought himself more as a trained illustrator than a cartoonist.  We’ve both had secondary training in each other’s fields but we come to drawing from different foundations.

After Paul heard me out he first told me to pick a medium to do the final cover in. Once I did that, I should practice doing my roughs in that medium. Switching mediums, as I had been, was only making things worse for me.  He asked me to find a style I wanted the cover to have and use that as my goal.

He then answered my first question.  He told me the reason my stuff was looking cartoony was because I was thinking like a cartoonist and not like a painter.  He told me, in order to get the realism I wanted, I should not think of drawing any lines at all. I should be thinking in planes and values. This made sense to me and it really cleared a lot of things up.  I’ve been to classes for this. I knew what he was talking about.  I was never great at it and I’d need to practice more, but the solution was clear.

He then answered my second question.  The shadow should have no detail. It should just be dark.  The center of interest would be the one eye looking to the side, why have any other details distracting from that detail?  The reason I had asked was because I’ve been trained in my figured drawing  classes to NOT put any details in the shadow areas.  I though somehow that because the piece I’m working on has so much shadow in the face that it would be weird to do that. He basically told me it wouldn’t look weird and reinforced my training.

The conversation was long and personal. We talked a bit more about different things about art but the main things that I got from it was what I just wrote above. When the conversation was over, it was time for me to decide what medium I was going to use to finish the drawing.  After thinking about it and IM-ing Paul once or twice, I decided to go with gouache paint. I’d never used gouache but I thought it would be a valuable tool to learn. It would make me more versatile as an artist.

Since I didn’t have gouache, and I had a little bit of time, I decided to start experimenting with a “plains and values” study, using Black Prismacolor on tracing paper.  This is what I did. The first drawing I did was the one on the right and I believe the last one was the one on the left.

These drawings helped me wrap my head around trying to think in only planes and values. Problem was that I kept getting uneven values in my drawing which threw me off. So next I decided I was going to use my markers to try to get all the values in certain areas to be the same. So I did the drawing below:

I was mainly concentrating on the face.  At this point I wasn’t sure how dark to make it but I did begin to see that an all dark face with just the right combination of light patterns would work.

That day, on the way home, I bought some gouache.  The next time day, during my lunch break I began experimenting with the paint.  I painted some test shapes in order to see how I could blend and render with them.  I found that I really liked gouache.  The next day, I decided to begin my first pass of a rough sketch. The problem was that I used a different method to paint the rough than I had used with my shapes test.  I didn’t have the type of control I wanted using this new method.

Next time, I’ll use the method I used with my test shapes.  I think I’m getting closer and closer to making a breakthrough.  I hope I am.  I want to get done so I can go back to my cartoon.

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