Helpful Drawing Exercises

1. Draw only what truly interests you.You should find subjects that inspire you.

2. Accept opportunities not obligations: If there isa time limits or uncomfortable circumstances ora complex subject to begin to cause stress just stop and adjust your expectations as to what can be reasonable.

3. Please yourself not others: Sketching, drawing should be seen as a continuing source of enjoyment and learning rather than a string of performances for other people. Sketching is a highly personal process. It must first work for you if it is ever to be useful to others.

The Process of Drawing:

1.Hand-eye coordination and learn the process and learn the process of "building" sketches. Drawing skills like athletic skills require constant practice to assure peak performance; when we fail exercises them, we lose perception, concentration, relaxed awareness and dexterity.

Exercise 1: In this exercise use your none-drawing hand as a model, ( Contour Drawing )

1. Starts with longest lines and edges.

2. Keep your pen on paper and your eye on the subject , try to trace the edges and folds of your hand as if your are touching them with your eyes.

3. No Rush! calmly, observe the changes and nuances of the forms you see. Build a habit of concentration and observation.

Emphasis:

Exploring the Creative Uniqueness & Technical Considerations of Comics

The nature of comics combines printed words and pictures in a unique way. Comics continually offer new possibilities by encouraging artists to explore new kinds of storytelling and create new illustrative styles as an experimental art form and more importantly, as a practical craft. Comics provide a range of points of access into the narrative strategies medium and demonstrate that it has much to tell us about the culture in which we live.

Comics can also violate the rules of the medium by parodying various events and figures in history. (Pustz 1999, p.110). Reading comics requires a different skill to other forms of reading since literacy includes specific knowledge about texts with stories, information, characters, and genres. Readers also come to understand how to interpret the interaction between comic language basic vocabulary words and pictures and other elements.

According to McCloud, art style too can have a meaning. Emotional meaning is produced by an artist's use of different lines. A picture can evoke an emotional or sensual response in the viewer. Gentle curves might communicate innocence, while sharp lines might create feelings of anxiety and dark heavy lines might be best suited to the grim worlds of crime and horrors.

Figure 6. Living in the Line (1993), page 119

McCloud also suggests that the strip has no fixed or absolute meaning except for acting as a sort of indicator that time and space are being divided. An individual strip can depict a single frozen moment in time or a series of moments, involving motion and dialogue, but how strips are arranged is important, sometimes defying the flow of time in a narrative. The amount of time the reader spends on a particular scene can be control by the content ofthe strips. The artist divides he story into separate scenes. Aspect to aspect transition involves a montage of elements reflecting a simple place, idea, or mood. Comic literacy contributes to the construction of comic culture by confining the audience and giving it a body of common knowledge.

McCloud notes that comics ask the mind to work out the gaps between panels. He argues that comics are a ‘ Natural’ form of communication and people have to learn how to read comic books and develop a certain amount of Comics Literacy. This process include understanding how the basic language works, as well as knowing certain bodies of information that give readers more ways to create meaning. One of the first things to take into account is that the readers must understand the interpretation behind the arrangement of panels on a page. This arrangement is essentially the machinery of a narrative.

McCloud devotes an entire chapter in his book to show how the closure between panels happens in the artist’s and reader’s mind. What happens in closure is that readers use their imagination to transform two separate but adjacent images into a single idea. Of course, closure is achieved only if the reader understands how the different kinds of panel transition work; something the most experienced comic book reader will have a result of the unconscious assimilation of the content. McCloud suggest that the moment to moment transition, focuses on a single subject in a brief sequence of subject. In these six panels below, the movement is slow and gradual, and readers do not spend much effort to apply closure between the gutters.

Figure 7. Moment to Moment (1993), by McCloud

Resources: Eisner, W. (1985), Comics and Sequential Art, (Florida: Poorhouse Press) McCloud, S. (1993) Understanding comics, (New York: Harper Perennial) Pustz, M. (1999) Comic Book Culture: fan boys and true believers, (USA: University Press of Mississippi

#photo #collection #comics

The Fundamental Aspects of Comics

Reading Comics: How Comics Work and What They Mean.

The basis of the comics as a medium is its combination of words and pictures in sequence to tell stories; abstract forms representing realities that convey narratives. It usually features short conversations between characters. Unlike stand-alone pieces of art, comics are made up of sequences of pictures using the convention of a segmented frame, often focused on capturing an emotional response from readers. Messages carried by visual images have been part of the human experience since cave paintings. Comic theorist Scott McCloud traces as a reference for the history of comics, The Bayeux Tapestry which used text and images to narrate the Battle of Hastings in a series of episodes. This tapestry is a horizontal strip of embroidered linen representing the Norman conquest of England in a pictorial narrative and used a sequence of juxtaposed pictures (i e. a strip of pictures), usually contributing to the meaning of the pictures and vice versa (Heer & Worcester 2009, p. 26)

Figure 1. The Bayeux Tapestry, (1066 BC)

McCloud notes that comic artists have a range of representations to work with, which varies from the extremely realistic pictorial representations to detailed cartoons. McCloud uses realistic and iconic images and he notes that icons and symbols represent ideas and they can be viewed in different ways according to the reader’s interpretations. He suggests that the word’ icon’ means any image used to represent a person, place, thing or idea. The icons we call pictures and these are images designed to actually resemble their subjects but as resemblance varies, so does the level of iconic content. In the non-pictorial icons, meaning is fixed and absolute.

Their appearance doesn’t affect their meaning because they represent invisible ideas. In cartoon pictures however, meaning is fluid and variable according to appearance; they differ from ‘real life’ appearance to varying degrees. We think photographs and realistic pictures mirror real life but in reality, they are less detailed and flat. On the other hand, pictorial cartoons have more adaptable meanings as they are focused on specific details, enabling an artist to enhance the meaning, in a way that realistic.(1993 p. 27-28)

How we express ourselves through body language doesn't break down quite as easily as facial expressions.

Face gestures express emotions from the face and head alone. They are used to describe looks, feelings or emphasize situations. They are also used to send or receive messages of trust, approval or dominance. An artist can represent visual reality by moving from simple representations to purely verbal symbols that McCloud calls ‘language’. By simply drawing two dots, a circle and a line, a cartoon icon could be created which would be understood by people of differing cultures and languages.

Figure 3. A Text Balloon (2012), page 98

A text balloon is a symbol attached to particular characters as a means of attributing dialogue. The use of storytelling devices such as captions and text balloons, can make the themes in a comic especially

straightforward.

Comics combined with narratives are there to enhance the image and add another opportunity to suggest meaning to the reader. (Barker 1989, p.11) In fact, we do not read the words but hear them. When we put the pictures in comic form there is an interaction between the picture and speech balloon, to produce a meaning of sound, we only ‘hear’ with our eyes. It is up to an artist to make readers see what they are supposed to see, by keeping the reader’s eye flowing through the comic.

The complex nature of this combination allows for much flexibility in the manipulation of meaning, but often in a context that is constrained within a small pace. The limited space in which the artist has to work, for example, may entice the creator to use stereotypes to convey information quickly. (Walker 1994 p. 9)

These characteristics have implications both for the representation and the interpretation of images and meaning. (McAllister, Sewell, Gordon, 2001, p.3) Images combine with text to enhance the image and add another opportunity to suggest real situations.

Eisner suggested that;

“In it is most economical state, comics employ a series of repetitive images and recognizable symbols. When these are used again to convey similar ideas, they become a language a literacy form if you will. And it is this discipline application that creates the ‘grammar’ of Sequential Art.” (Eisner 1985, p.8)

In Comics and Sequential Art (1993) Eisner describes the format of comic books. Eisner presents a montage of both words and images and the reader is thus required to exercise both visual an verbal interpretive skills so as to create meaning. (fig. 4)

Furthermore, McCloud argues that the cartoon, by virtue of its greater iconicity and abstraction, is something we are compelled to identify with. “By de-emphasizing the appearance of the physical world in favour of the idea of form, the cartoon places itself in the world of concepts…” McCloud explains, “Through traditional realism, the comics artist can portray the world without and through the cartoon, the world within” (p.41).

Comic artists have exploited this correlation between the realistic and the iconic in effective ways; main characters with whom one is to identify are often drawn more schematically on the other hand, other characters can be drawn in great detail. Also, when a setting is particularly important to the storyline, as in Tintin’s adventures, the background can be drawn in great detail, while the characters are drawn more simply to assist reader identification.

Tintin combines very iconic characters within unexpected realistic settings. Herge’s Linge Claire (Clear Line), carries an obvious ideological as well as stylistic burden: his comics not only parody racist stereotypes redolent of Tintin’s colonial ethos, but also reveal a fascination with blurring the distinction between organic and inorganic form for both children and adults. (Heer & Worcester 2009, p. 144-145)

There are so many elements to observe in each Tintin story, for example, Herge alternates between pictures with and without background imagery in which he shifts between highly detailed pictures and ones with lots of empty spaces. This technique is determined by a clear storytelling principle, he meets this challenge by creating fine drawings, yet in an effective way. In comics there’s a certain convention regarding action or movement: when characters move, they very often tend to move from left to right, of course following the direction in which many cultures/ethnicities read. Most of the Tintin-stories are read from left to right, but Tintin in Tibet uses a different route throughout the entire book, a lot of physical action is described, and everything follows the left to right rule but on the final page, this rule is broken.

Resources: Eisner, W. (1985), Comics and Sequential Art, (Florida: Poorhouse Press) McCloud, S. (1993) Understanding comics, (New York: Harper Perennial) Pustz, M. (1999) Comic Book Culture: fan boys and true believers, (USA: University Press of Mississippi

Moor, D & Dwyer F. (1994) Visual Literacy: A spectrum of Visual Learning, (New Jersey: Educational Technology Publications)

Farr, M. (2001) Tintin: The complete Companion, (London: John Murray ltd.)

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