Draw! #12 by TwoMorrows Publishing

THE PROFESSIONAL “HOW-TO” MAGAZINE ON COMICS & CARTOONING

The ever-Pliable

NUMBER 12

KYLE BAKER

SPRING 2006

Machine Teen’s

$6.95

MIKE HAWTHORNE

IN THE U.S.A.

The Venture Brothers’

PLUS!

COMIC ART BOOT CAMP WITH

ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR TUTORIAL BY

bret blevinS

ALBERTO RUIZ!

MIKE MANLEY

AND

CHRIS McCULLOCH

THE PROFESSIONAL “HOW-TO” MAGAZINE ON COMICS & CARTOONING WWW.DRAWMAGAZINE.COM

SPRING 2006 • VOL. 1, NO. 12

FEATURES

Editor-in Chief • Michael Manley Designer • Eric Nolen-Weathington Publisher • John Morrow Logo Design • John Costanza Proofreaders • John Morrow & Eric Nolen-Weathington Transcription • Steven Tice

COVER STORY INTERVIEW WITH CARTOONIST KYLE BAKER

For more great information on cartooning and animation, visit our Web site at: http://www.drawmagazine.com

Front Cover Illustration by Kyle Baker

SUBSCRIBE TO DRAW! Four quarterly issues: $24 US Standard Mail, $36 US First Class Mail ($44 Canada, Elsewhere: $48 Surface, $64 Airmail). We accept US check, money order, Visa and Mastercard at TwoMorrows, 10407 Bedfordtown Dr., Raleigh, NC 27614, (919) 449-0344, E-mail: twomorrow@aol.com ADVERTISE IN DRAW! See page 2 for ad rates and specifications. DRAW! SPRING 2006, Vo l . 1, No . 12 w as p r o d u c ed b y A c t i o n Pl an et In c . an d p u b li s h ed b y Tw o Mo r ro ws Pu b l i s h in g . Michael Manley, Editor, John Morrow, Publisher. Editorial Address is PO Box 2129, Upper Darby, PA 19082. Subscription Address: TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Dr., Raleigh, NC 27614. DRAW! and its logo are trademarks of Action Planet Inc. All contributions herein are copyright 2006 by their respective contributors. Action Planet Inc. and TwoMorrows Publishing accept no responsibility for unsolicited submissions. All artwork herein is copyright the year of production, its creator (if workfor-hire, the entity which contracted said artwork); the characters featured in said artwork are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners; and said artwork or other trademarked material is printed in these pages with the consent of the copyright holder and/or for journalistic, educational and historical purposes with no infringement intended or implied. The Bakers, Cowboy Wally, Holmes & Watson, King David, Nat Turner, Why I Hate Saturn, You Are Here ™ and © 2006 Kyle Baker • Batman, Joker, Lex Luthor, Plastic Man, Superman, Woozy Winks are ™ and © 2006 DC Comics • Captain America, Daredevil, Darkhawk, Kingpin, New Mutants, Sleepwalker, Spider-Man, Terror Inc. ™ and © 2006 Marvel Characters, Inc. • Popeye ™ and © 2006 King Features Syndicate, Inc. • Goofy, Mickey Mouse ™ and © 2006 Disney Enterprises, Inc. • Dick Tracy ™ and © 2006 Tribune Media Services, Inc. • Hysteria ™ and © 2006 Mike Hawthorne • Queen & Country ™ and © 2006 Greg Rucka • Ballad of Sleeping Beauty ™ and © Beckett Enterprises, Inc • The Venture Brothers ™ and © 2006 Noodle Soup Productions • Dexter’s Lab ™ and © 2006 Cartoon Network • John Carter of Mars ™ and © 2006 ERB, Inc. This entire issue is © 2006 Action Planet Inc. and TwoMorrows Publishing and may not be reprinted or retransmitted without written permission of the copyright holders. Printed in Canada. FIRST PRINTING.

COMICS HYSTERIA AND THE BALLAD OF SLEEPING BEAUTY ARTIST MIKE HAWTHORNE

ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR TIPS DEADLINE HUNTER BY ALBERTO RUIZ

THE VENTURE BROTHERS INTERVIEW WITH SERIES CREATOR CHRIS McCULLOCH

COMIC ART BOOT CAMP CREATIVE PERSPECTIVE BY BRET BLEVINS & MIKE MANLEY

FROM THE EDITOR First off I’d like to thank Rachel Simon, the producer at Noodle Soup Productions in New York, the studio which produces The Venture Brothers for Adult Swim, not only for her help in putting together this article, but for The Venture Brothers crew’s help and time when I took my class of animators from DCAD (Delaware College of Art and Design) to visit the studio on our class trip to NYC. In the middle of their busy schedule they were very gracious with their time and answered a lot of questions about their working process for the students. There were many smiles that day and a lot of inspiration; seeing how a real studio is run is something every student should have happen. I’d also like to thank this issue’s contributors, Kyle Baker and his assistant Nicole, for all the help in conducting this interview which is so big we had to break it into two parts—the second half will run in the next issue of DRAW!. I’ve always admired Baker’s work and it was really great to get a chance to rap with him about his work and his philosophy as a businessman, something everyone working in comics can take a page from. A tip of the hat and a cheese steak to my pal and DRAW! columnist Jamar (Grand Poobah) Nicholas for his great job in conducting the interview with Mike Hawthorne, certainly one of the most talented and prolific artists working in comics today, as well as being a super-nice guy. These two are old buddies and I thought because of that it would be great to have them get together and yak about the old days and the current work Hawthorne is doing. I think the interview is one of the most honest and frank you will read from a working cartoonist. This issue also starts a new regular feature in each issue that is a direct result of your many requests for more on some of the basics like perspective, anatomy, storytelling, etc. So this issue Bret and I have started a feature we decided to call “Comic Art Boot Camp,” and each issue we will lay down some Basic Training on a variety of subjects, like this issue’s premiere article, “Creative Perspective.” There are a host of good books out there on perspective, but not much on how to take it to the next level and push it, break the rules to enhance a page, panel, or illustration. Also, a hearty slap on the back to Eric who keeps making my job easier by taking the hard part of the layout on DRAW! out of my hands and letting me concentrate on the editorial side. In closing I’d like to say I hope to see more feedback from you readers both on our message board and in our mail box—it was the continual letters and e-mails asking for more on basic drawing skills that led to our new feature. I hope to see you at one of the cons I’ll be attending this spring and summer. I plan to be at the Philadelphia Wizard World Con, the San Diego Comic-Con, and, I hope, the Charlotte Heroes Con as well. Have a great spring and I’ll see you in the summer,

Mike Manley, Editor E-mail: mike@drawmagazine.com Website: www.drawmagazine.com Snail mail: PO Box 2129, Upper Darby, PA 19082

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DRAW! • SPRING 2006

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The Artist, Kyle Baker, the Comic Book Maker Interview conducted by Mike Manley Edited by Mike Manley and Kyle Baker Transcribed by Steven Tice arly in his career, Kyle Baker left behind the journeyman-like work of monthly comics to embark on a path that would lead him to produce graphic novels such as Cowboy Wally and the much lauded Why I Hate Saturn long before graphic novels became the rage they are today. Baker further expanded his efforts with I Die at Midnight, You Are Here, and King David, all for DC Comics. With Nat Turner, Baker is starting a new chapter in a career that has spanned 20 years and earned him a wall full of Eisner and Harvey Awards: Kyle Baker the self-publisher. DRAW! Editor Mike Manley caught up with the busy artist as he was in full production on the second issue of his slavery epic,

Nat Turner. DRAW!: So what was your work day like today? Were you working on Plastic Man, or were you working on Nat Turner? KYLE BAKER: Today was actually catch-up day, doing all my phone calls and paying bills and picking up bills and things like that. With the self-publishing, there’s lots of that kind of filling invoices and then billing people, and things like that, which I tend to put off. And weeks when I’m on deadline, like if I’m working on a Plastic Man, nothing gets done for a week. Nothing else. DRAW!: I know what you mean. I’m basically the same way, I let everything pile up, and then I have to sit down and basically have a couple days where I have to go through and do all of my business and correspondence. What is my long distance phone service? Oh, I forgot to pay the bill!

KB: Like today, one of the things that happened when I was in San Diego was I sold a couple of things by credit card at my booth, but I never sent in the receipts or whatever. You swipe the card, but then you have to send them to the bank and the credit card companies and they send you the money. So that was what I finally got around to doing today. [laughs] DRAW!: So you’re the alpha and the omega there at Kyle Baker, Inc. KB: Yeah, there’s also my assistant Nicole who’s taking care of a lot of stuff. At this point, I’m still trying to stay on top; we keep getting these orders for, like, ten books, or two books, or stuff like that, little tiny orders, and those are the ones that kind of pile up on you. DRAW!: Right. I dealt with that when I was in the midst of the heat of self-publishing, back about nine, eight years ago, I was doing the same thing. I would get my reorders from Diamond and they were like, “Send two copies of Action Planet # 2 to this DRAW! • SPRING 2006

K YL E B A K ER

COMICS

place, send five over here.” And so I would be making little boxes of books to ship, and you had to follow with the invoice to make sure you got paid.

LEFT: Cover to Nat Turner #2. BELOW: The artist at work. RIGHT: Opening panel of Nat Turner #1.

These little tiny $15 checks coming in, and then you have to remember to send out, like, four envelopes, because it’s a four-issue series.

KB: Yeah, I’ve been waiting for my comp boxes—I get comps of The Simpsons—and they come five to a box, which I guess is the least they can send from the printer. [Mike laughs] So I was waiting for a Simpsons box to show up so I could fill this order that I got. [laughs] I’ve got all the—

DRAW!: Right, right. KB: We wanted to make it available to everybody, but that one, we just said, “God.” It turned out to be too much work for the return on the investment. You know what I mean?

DRAW!: You use the comp boxes, when they send them to you.

DRAW!: Right.

KB: Yeah. Well, I’ve got those, and then I got the boxes that they send me the comics in when I have my comics printed. So I never throw boxes out anymore.

KB: ...to make three bucks. [laughs]

DRAW!: With TwoMorrows, they actually have a mail house that fulfills the subscriptions, so they take the copies over. Basically, that’s how most magaR. 05 KYLE BAKE © AND TM 20 DRAW!: I was the same way. I would zines do it; they have a company that actually hanNAT TURNER take all the boxes I would get from my dles that, because they can’t possibly afford to send out two copies comps from Marvel or DC, and then I would recycle those, ship- like that, y’know, have a room full of people working for Time magping however many issues for each distribution center. Although azine stuffing Time magazines in the Time Life building and sendDiamond actually has a lot fewer of those now. I think they only ing them out. But, that’s the hands-on aspect of self-publishing, and, have, what, two or three or something? They used to have, like, you know, 20 copies here, 20 copies there, five copies here, seven ten. copies there adds up at the end of a year, and especially on a good project that’s getting some heat. I would assume a book like Nat KB: I think it’s somewhere between three and five now. Turner has a longer shelf life—it is not something that is going to have a one- to two-week shelf life. It’s not like a regular super-hero DRAW!: Yeah, they used to have a lot more, so I was sending comic, say, that you have 30 days of it having a valid sales window two copies here, two copies there. And that eats up a good little and then it’s a back issue. I mean, you can keep it in print forever. bit of time to do that. KB: It does, and it doesn’t—it’s a fine line, because at this point I’m still trying to drum up business and stuff, and the reorder thing, it’s pretty good this time. Since Nat Turner came out—it was I guess a month ago or two months ago—we keep getting these little, tiny orders, anywhere from 50 to ten. It’s been nice. But also, we were selling subscriptions for a couple of weeks, until we gave up on that. DRAW!: Oh, so you were trying to sell subscriptions to Nat Turner? KB: We had them, yeah. And it wasn’t that it wasn’t working, it was that it was just becoming too much work. 4

DRAW! • SPRING 2006

KB: Yeah. DRAW!: And now I would imagine, issue two is out? KB: No, I’m working on the second issue now. The second issue will be out when DRAW! #12 comes out. DRAW!: I see your situation being like my friend Ande Parks, who just had his Truman Capote comic/biography published by Oni Press. I remember talking to him and saying, “You know, this thing is going to have legs, because unlike something like Batman, where it © AND TM 2005 KYLE BAKER

Interviewed by Jamar Nicholas

Transcribed by Steven Tice

rtist Mike Hawthorne may be able to justifiably wrest the “ hardest working man in entertainment” title away from James Brown just on page count alone. A prolific artist, Hawthorne has quickly risen up from his indy cred beginnings page-bypage on such books as his own Hysteria, as well as Queen & Country, Terminator 3, Ruule, 3 Days in Europe, and, most recently, Marvel’s Machine Teen. Hawthorne’s work always delivers strong drawing, great storytelling, and a sense of fun that has him pulling away from his pack of peers, clearly showing he isn’t a one-trick pony. His diverse body of work shows he can handle a great variety of subjects, from sci-fi to soap opera—which I have to say impresses the hell out of me. Hawthorne’s earned his bones, and he happens to be one of the nicest guys in comics you’ll ever meet. DRAW! interviewer and long time pal, Jamar Nicholas, who’s known Hawthorne since the beginning of his career, interviewed Hawthorne from his home in York, Pennsylvania.

—Mike Manley

DRAW! • SPRING 2006

MIKE HAWTHORNE

COMICS LEFT: Mike mugs for the camera thug-style. BELOW: Kung-fu action. RIGHT: The Kingpin from sketch to inks.

JAMAR NICHOLAS Mike, tell us about your childhood. What was it like growing up? MIKE HAWTHORNE: Well, I had a good and bad childhood. I was in a single parent house, just mom trying to make due. We were broke. Real broke. We were even homeless once, did I ever tell you about that? JN: No... MH: Yeah, it was bad at one point when we first moved to Pennsylvania. My mother, who was Puerto Rican, couldn’t get a good job. She had worked at Group W cable in NYC for like 10 years or more, but couldn’t get a shot at the local cable company here in PA. We were on welfare—government cheese, government peanut butter in a cardboard jar, the whole nine. We got evicted from a house we moved into early in here in York City, and we had to move above a bar to keep from being on the street. One room, with one bathroom for the whole floor. Dudes used to take their “dates” up there for an hour at a time, know what I mean? JN: Wow. MH: I remember my mom used to push the TV in front of the door to make sure no one broke in! She kept my milk for the Cheerios on the windowsill, ’cause it was winter. I remember thinking it wasn’t that bad, but I could see how bad my mother felt. JN: Yeah, when we’re kids, you don’t have a point of reference— it’s just how you live. MH: Exactly. You didn’t really know you’re that poor ’til you see how other kids lived. Then we got taken in by this family—this lady with three kids. I hated them at times man, cause they made sure I didn't forget I was worse off then them. I was getting to where I could tell I was poor. I started hating it, started hating not having options. If I remember correctly, I started to draw more at this point. We just had that one room, and I never wanted to be around the family so I drew a lot.... well, I always drew. But I think it really got serious here. Then, when we moved I made friends with a dude on my block named Shavane. He put me on to comics, ’cause at the time I just drew graffiti and little hip-hop characters. JN: What time period was this? 30

DRAW! • SPRING 2006

MH: Ahh... 4th grade, maybe 5th? I forget. My mom isn’t around anymore, or I’d ask her. JN: This is like mid-’80s? I forget—I’m a little older than you. MH: Yeah, I’m 29 so that sounds right. Mid-’80’s... I was listening to Stetsasonic after we moved from that house. I could use my old Hip-Hop tapes as my timeline! JN: We have a lot in common, Mike. MH: Word! [laughter] JN: OK, so then, you weren’t thinking you wanted to draw for a living, were you? MH: Nah, not yet. I was just amazed that someone could draw highlights in hair or make something look like metal! I couldn’t believe some of this stuff when I saw it in comics. It was like magic to me. JN: Yeah! I remember having this old Terry Austin X-Men poster, and I would just stare at Colossus’ metal plates all day. It was amazing. MH: Exactly! I remember drawing Colossus and kids were bugging out on it! “Yooo, how’d you make it look like metal!?” It was like I became a magician by looking at that stuff. Like learning tricks by watching the stage show. JN: Especially for li’l dirty kids in the hood, you didn’t draw for a living. You drew as a hobby. That’s not a “real” job that people would strive for. MH: You drew graf[fitti]. Like I told you before, I use to charge to draw peoples’ names and stuff. But, to actually have art be your job? That was crazy! My mom used to tell me artists aren’t worth any money ’til after they died! JN: So did you wanna play ball or something when you got older? Every kid had some sort of vocation they thought they’d do. MH: I wanted to box at one point. I lived next to ©2006 MIKE HAWTHORNE

By Alberto Ruiz

The deadline for the new DRAW! magazine article was fast approaching, and instead of choosing a “tool” to write about, I decided to use the current cover I was working on to illustrate a typical “tight deadline” assignment. The final cover illustration took one full day to complete; the article, well that’s another story. The concept was based on an old preliminary sketch I never got the chance to use. Salsipuedes is the name of a famous hanging bridge in the almost inaccessible mountains of Ecuador. I’ve always thought the name was interesting and fitting, because in Spanish “sal si puedes” means “get out if you can,” which is precisely what one thinks while crossing the bridge. It turns out the peculiar moniker is not as original as I once believed; an

Internet search resulted in more than two dozen towns throughout the Americas and Spain bearing the same name, including a California municipality and school district.

The concept plays on the literal meaning of the set of words that make up the name. Because I was both the client and the art director for this piece, the approval process was a snap! I showed the preliminary rough to Alberto (my art director and account manager) and he approved it with but a few minor changes. He then showed the concept to the client (Mr. Ruiz) who was delighted with the clever concept and stamped his seal of approval on the spot. DRAW! • SPRING 2006

ALBERTO RUIZ

Through the years, I’ve managed to keep a pretty substantial amount of preliminary, unused and unfinished repeat patterns I either created or converted for use in the garment industry. This effort has paid good dividends time and time again.

DIGITAL ILLUSTRATION

You can download the original files at this address: http://homepage.mac.com/deepfriedcandy

As with most of the work colored in Illustrator, I started by drawing the main shapes with the Pen tool, following the pencil line as closely as possible when tight and simplifying complex shapes as I went along.

All the shapes conforming the face and body were filled with the same (pink to white) gradient, using the white of the paper as both mid-tone and highlight color—a good opportunity to apply “negative shape” theories. There is no time for excessive detail such as hair and other complicated minutiae. I filled in the two hair shapes with an old, unused, abstract flower repeat pattern I had created a zillion years ago for textile use. I used a more “populated” pattern for the cowboy hat, in direct contrast with the broader, flatter shapes of the hair fill.

You can download the original files at this address: http://homepage.mac.com/deepfriedcandy

DRAW! • SPRING 2006

Mix two parts Jonny Quest with one part Hardy Boys and maybe a dash of Scooby Doo and might you end up with Adult Swim’s hit series, The Venture Brothers, created by Chris McCulloch, who was one of the writers from the short-lived live-action Tick series on Fox. DRAW! editor Mike Manley was one of the storyboard artists on the first and second seasons of The Venture Brothers, and visited the Noodle Soup Productions studio in New York with his college class in order to shine some light behind the scenes and get a scoop of noodles on Los Bros. Venture. Mike conducted this interview with show creator Chris McCulloch via the Internet.

DRAW!: I guess first off I’d like a little bio info. Where and when were you born? Chris McCulloch: Brooklyn, New York. 1971. Lived there until my father remarried in 1983 and we all moved to New Jersey.

DRAW!: Did you go to art school? CMc: Yes and no. I enrolled in the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art and then quit on the first day. I had spent my last two years of high school dreaming of going to Kubert’s (if I’m to be shamelessly honest, those dreams more than likely included me drawing Spider-Man for a living, and maybe marrying Jamie Gertz or something) and I took no interest in college whatsoever—a result of already knowing what I wanted to be “when I grew up” and a blinding misconception of how much colleges cost based solely on the tuition for Columbia University, which I heard about from a guy I knew. No offense to Joe or his fine school, but it happened to be situated only 20 minutes from my father’s house, and I was working after school in a comic-book store at the time. It suddenly hit me—as all my friends were heading off to their big colleges with lush, sprawling campuses—that I was about to spend the next few years of my life waking up every day in my parents’ house, commuting to a school to learn how to draw comics, and working in a comic shop until it was time to go back home to my parents’ house. The depressingly narrow

scope of it all just caved in on me that first morning, I got super-depressed, and when I reached for the new watch I had gotten just a week or two before for my birthday, I noticed it had stopped. Silly as it sounds, I took it as an omen, and I decided I needed to quit and go to college after all. So after the worst three months of my life working at UPS, I started community college and eventually transferred to Rutgers University, where I majored in art and minored in English. I wasn’t crazy about their art program—they had more of a fine arts/conceptual-heavy curriculum that was light on technical training and luridly unfriendly to cartoonists (see Daniel Clowes’ The Art School Confidential—he explains it better than I ever will). So I ended up taking a lot of unnecessary history classes instead, just because I liked learning about that stuff, along with a couple of film and literature classes. Artistically, the best part about my education there was working on a weekly “alternative” school newspaper called The Medium. I did a full-page comic strip every week for three years and edited the Arts section for a while, so it was great practice for writing and drawing my own stuff. I never finished college because I ran out of money and got a job working on The Tick animated series. I often wish I had gone someplace like SVA (School of Visual Arts) or RISD (Rhode Island School of Design) or something, because my drawing skills were probably stunted by all of this—which frustrates the hell out of me because I can’t always visualize the things I create. But my writing skills and general social awareness improved at Rutgers, which is ultimately more important to me creatively.

CHRIS Mc CUL L OCH

ANIMATION

I love to write and draw my own stuff, but if I could only do one, I'd prefer writing. I'm pretty lazy that way—everything past the initial idea becomes work. The most fun to be had is in making stuff up. Watching myself fumble through heavyhanded attempts at drawing what inevitably becomes a lackluster version of whatever I had in my head is endlessly frustrating. I’ve definitely improved, but very slowly. I really wish I drew more. DRAW!: Were you heavily into comics and animation as a kid? CMc: Very much so. Like every kid, I was really into cartoons—as a product of the ’70s I enjoyed the heyday of Saturday morning TV, for better or VENTURE BROTHERS worse, but Looney Tunes really stood ™ ©2006 NOODLE SOUP PRODUCTIONS. out as the best there was. They hooked me at age one and they’ve never gotten old. In comic books, I was super into Spider-Man and Batman, despite the unwritten code of childhood that dictates you either like Marvel or DC, as you can only like Mad or Cracked, Mets or Yankees, Coke or Pepsi. My older brother was a real comics collector, and Spider-Man was his favorite, too, so I had access to nearly a decade’s worth of issues that predated me, which was really great, especially when the month’s wait for a new issue, in kid time, is like a year. I grew out of comics for a while, and even drawing, but then The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen hit during my adolescent/high school years and they pulled me back in. Having not much else to do with myself, I got super-serious about collecting and reading and drawing, and that’s when I started working in the comic shop and dreaming of drawing comics for a living. If having a brother with a sevenyear head start on a comics collection was the elementary school of my comics upbringing, then having an entire comic shop’s back issues to browse through was my Masters program. Good

god, I sound like a dork. It was a Master’s program in dorkiness, wasn’t it? That’s okay. I’m a dork. I’m fine with that. My girlfriend likes to remind me of this every time I accidentally start to think I’m cool because my hair looks good that day. DRAW!: [laughs] Since Venture Brothers is an obvious parody of Jonny Quest, were you a big fan of the old Hanna-Barbera cartoons? CMc: Not really. You kind of take what you’re given when you’re a kid, so I liked everything because, hey, it was TV. But they didn’t resonate with me like the Warner Bros. stuff at all. Not until I was older anyway and could approach them with a certain amount of irony or nostalgia or something, and appreciate the simplicity and retro-ness of the design work on them. DRAW!: Why the Venture Brothers? Was this an idea you had for a while? CMc: Yes and no. The germ of the idea—just two dorky boys named Venture with a ’60s aw-shucks sleuthing mentality—goes way back to the mid-’90s, when a friend lent me some old Tom Swift books and I started catching ABOVE AND LEFT: Head and body construction designs for Race Bannon stand-in, Brock Samson—a super-spy and bodyguard with a license to kill.

DRAW! • SPRING 2006

CREATIVE PERSPECTIVE By Br et Blevin s a n d M ik e M a n ley

n the realm of two-dimensional drawings or paintings made on a flat surface, visual perspective is always an illusion— the convincing appearance of objects and figures existing as three-dimensional forms that occupy space and extend across distances is achieved by deceiving the eye. If the lines, shapes, and masses are effectively chosen and placed by the artist, the viewer’s mind will use its history of real world observation to cooperate with the artist’s trickery and complete the illusion of depth. This marriage of real world observation and careful artifice is the key to our subject, because the focus of this article is the distortion and exaggeration of the traditional rules of drawn perspective to create dramatic effects. The drawing formulas of One-, Two-, and Three-Point perspective work through mimicry of real world appearances—by imitating the visual affect of the seen world as it is processed by our eyesight. The basic example of viewing, from the center point between the rails, a straight run of railroad track stretching away across a flat plain is a simple proof—by drawing two converging lines meeting at the distant horizon we can trick the brain into accepting our drawing’s claim of distance. This visual deceit, coupled with the willing cooperation of the viewer’s mind to “believe” in the artist’s legerdemain is our essential technique of creating all manner of complicated illusions of space and depth. I’m stressing the artificial essence of drawn perspective to free your thoughts from an adherence to “true,” “factual,” “realistic,” “accurate” constraints when considering this aspect of making representational drawings. Although spectacular, powerful, and beautiful images can be created with a schematically faithful drawing that respects the rules of optical perspective as inviolate laws, broadening our concept of those same rules into a sort of flexible “reference keyboard”—a playing field with room to bend and distort as invention inspires you—opens up endless potential for dramatic picture making. In this case fakery and deception have no negative connotations—they are essential means to our aesthetic goals. Of course, a straight, literal use of the traditional rules of perspective may be just the effect needed for a drawing, scene, or project, but restricting your ideas of what is possible to the limits of these rules is an unnecessary binding of your imagination. If you can push your drawing to subtle or outrageous extremes and it remains convincing—believable to the viewer—then anything that works is fine. Remember, in visual art, if it looks right, it is right! It’s important to understand the basic principles of traditional perspective drawing demonstrated at the beginning of this article because command of those precepts makes it possible to stretch beyond their dictates and reach for drawings that use more expressionistic/impressionistic distortion of space and form.

In my own work, I rely on a knowledge of classical perspective to “ground” my flights of fancy—to make extreme distortions feel consistent with the traditional world I may have created around it—in other words, make everything I draw believable to the viewer, no matter how outlandish.

PERSPECTIVE: A Glossary of Terms THE HORIZON LINE: The horizon line runs across the canvas at the eye level of the viewer. The horizon line is where the sky appears to meet the ground. VANISHING POINT: The vanishing point should be located near the center of the horizon line. The vanishing point is the single point where all parallel lines (orthogonals) that run towards the horizon line appear to converge, come together like train tracks in the distance. It’s usually placed at the viewer’s eye level. ORTHOGONAL LINES: Orthogonal lines are “visual rays” helping the viewer’s eye to connect points around the edges of the canvas to the vanishing point. An artist uses them to align the edges of windows, doors, walls and bricks, etc. LINEAR PERSPECTIVE: A mathematical system for creating the illusion of 3-D space and distance on a flat, 2-D surface such as paper, canvas, or wall. AERIAL PERSPECTIVE: Creates a sense of depth in a color drawing or painting by imitating the way the Earth’s atmosphere makes distant objects appear less distinct, hazy and more “bluish” as they recede into the distance. This is also known as atmospheric perspective. DRAW! • SPRING 2006

B RET B L EVINS

PERSPECTIVE Here are a few examples: As you can see in the “spacial charts” that accompany these drawings, I am bending, stretching, compressing, forcing forms and distance for dramatic effect, but always creating within a clear concept of my “working depth” to integrate all the elements together into an image that “fools” the eye into accepting my fanciful conceits. This diagram explains the structure of my thinking as I compose and execute an image. The PI C T UR E P L ANE is the two-dimensional surface on which all my information is imprisoned—the conceptual “window” through which the viewer perceives my scene. It’s also the only surface that I can physically manipulate (make lines and tones on). But the conception of my scene happens within the P I C T UR E BOX—I invent and arrange the elements within this imaginary working space—I am thinking in this depth field, my vantage point circumscribed by what is visible through the borders of the Picture Plane. Once I conceive the content of the scene, I decide on my P OI NT OF VI E W—the angle at which the elements will be “seen” through the frame of the Picture Plane—then I search for the shapes that create the strongest statement of the effect I’m after. Now we come to the fun part! This is where the artist is free to distort and exaggerate the forms in any way that enhances the aesthetic goal. Using traditional one-, two-, and three-point perspective as my mental “working reference points,” I can “push and pull” any element of the scene to the breaking point (the point where the drawing looks blatantly incorrect in some way and becomes unbelievable). Allowing yourself this freedom to manipulate forms and spacial relationships is especially useful when creating narrative artwork, because it expands your repitoire of storytelling tools. The perspective choices found in these examples were all shaped by the drama or humor being portrayed.

Th i s ex p l o s i o n i s t h e c l o s es t point to the p i c t u r e p l an e.

Th es e c h ar ac t er s ’ f eet ar e t h e f ar t h es t p o i n t f r o m t h e p i c t u r e p l an e.

DRAW! • SPRING 2006