Not too long ago I had an active Patreon where I posted process documentation for Joe Death and the Graven Image and other random side projects. I’m currently deep in developmental primordial ooze for my next book so I wanted to bring out a few older posts from that Patreon. This will be a four-part series I “aired” between August 2020 and May 2021, called The Past is Pulp. Please enjoy!
About halfway through last week, I was spent, really drained. This was probably due to splitting my attention too much, trying to do comics, kids books, and animated backgrounds. I was tired but not necessarily tired from working, I think I was just tired of trying to make sense of each of those industries.
I mentioned yesterday that I've noticed a few of my favorite artists just copying their favorite artists, master-copy, study-type, stuff. Two artists, in particular, do this and they are, to me, doing some of the most exciting things in comics, illustration and animation. Kickliy, as I featured yesterday and James Noellert. I'm a subscriber to Noellert's Patreon and he wrote this the other day, talking about drawing and practicing from reference.
"An end thought on reference in general, when I hear people talking about finding their style or voice by intentionally trying to do things differently than what has come before, I want to cynically exaggerate the other approach- just do my best job to rip off all of the things I love. Over time, the aggregate and remixing of all these stolen ideas turns into what looks like a cohesive and original approach (hopefully) but with the subconscious skeleton of something more concrete and universal."
If you see one person you admire doing something, you could call that interesting. If you see two people you admire doing the same thing, you could call that a necessity for your own practice. So, I combed through my Pinterest boards looking for something to have fun with. I found this, a long-time favorite:
That horse though...can you believe it? I had to draw it. At first very small to get a handle on the basic composition and character positions, then tracing at the same size.
Now, a little larger at 4x5 inches. Then tracing that sketch twice.
I really wasn't interested in treating this exercise like a polished cover or comic page, but rather more similar to how I've been coming at my children's book stuff, small, loose, a little sketchy.
I also didn't try to replicate a painting, but instead translated the original painting into more of an ink drawing with flat colors, like a comic. This taught me a lot about inking three-dimensional forms. The painting is already doing that well, so it was relatively easy for me to figure it out.
The more literal color was fun, but I thought lacking in many ways, so I played with a contrasting warm and cool light for the background and foreground.
This was a blast and I would love to do many more, but perhaps that would get me in a worse bind than just doing them whenever I get drained from other work haha. I'd highly recommend you trying this if you're wanting to improve as a visual artist, this is kind of like a "full-body workout" for the illustrator and cartoonist.
Happy Saturday folks!