THE PROFESSIONAL “HOW-TO” MAGAZINE ON COMICS AND CARTOONING
BILL WRAY BRET BLEVINS CELIA CALLE STEPHEN DESTEFANO MIKE MANLEY ANDE PARKS
NUMBER 6 SPRING 2003
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THIS ISSUE ISSUE CONTAINS CONTAINS NUDITY NUDITY FOR FOR THE THE PURPOSE PURPOSE OF OF FIGURE FIGURE THIS DRAWING & ART INSTRUCTION—INTENDED FOR MATURE READERS DRAWING & ART INSTRUCTION—INTENDED FOR MATURE READERS
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JACK KIRBY COLLECTOR #38: KIRBY: STORYTELLER!
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• NEW COVERS by GAHAN WILSON & MARK BODÉ! • Interviews with GAHAN WILSON and NatLamp art director MICHAEL GROSS! • Interviews with and art by the mag's top contributors: NEAL ADAMS, FRANK SPRINGER, SEAN KELLY, SHARY FLENNEKIN, ED SUBITSKY, M.K. BROWN, B.K. TAYLOR, BOBBY LONDON, MICHEL CHOQUETTE, ALAN KUPPERBERG, and many more!
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Get practical advice and tips on writing from top pros on both sides of the desk, including: • HOWARD CHAYKIN on writing for comics & TV! • PAUL DINI on animated writing! • DENNY O'NEIL offers more tips for comics writers! • KURT BUSIEK shows how he scripts! • PLUS: FABIAN NICIEZA, DeFALCO & FRENZ, & more! (Edited by DANNY FINGEROTH • 84 pages) Four-issue subscriptions: $20 Standard, $32 First Class (Canada: $40, Elsewhere: $44 Surface, $60 Airmail).
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SPRING 2003 • VOL. 1, NO. 6
FEATURES
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3
COVER STORY A FRANK AND FUNNY INTERVIEW AND DEMO WITH BIG BLOWN BILL WRAY!
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Front Cover Illustration STEPHEN DESTEFANO and BILL WRAY
20
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DRAW! SPRING 2003, Vol. 1, No. 6 was produced by Action Planet Inc. and published by TwoMorrows Publishing. Michael Manley, Editor, John Morrow, Publisher. Editorial Address is PO Box 2129, Upper Darby, PA 19082. Subscription Address: TwoMorrows Publishing, 1812 Park Dr., Raleigh, NC 27605. DRAW! and its logo are trademarks of Action Planet Inc. All contributions herein are copyright 2003 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 work-for-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.Batman,Superman,Bizarro,Lois Lane, Starman,Mxyzptlk, ’Mazing Man, Lobo, Aquaman, Aqualad, Batgirl, The Legion, Fight for Tomorrow, Vigilante, Live Wire are TM and © 2003 DC COMICS • Monroe © 2003 E. C. Publications Inc. • Dexter’s Lab, Samurai Jack, Zesty Relish © TM Cartoon Network • Hellboy Jr. TM and © 2003 Mike Mignola • Dennis the Menace TM and © 2003 King Features Syndicate. Storm, Wolverine, MechaniX, Spirits of Vengence TM and © 2003 Marvel Characters, Inc. • Elvira ® TM and © 2003 Queen “B” productions • Popeye © and TM King Features • Big Blown Baby TM and © 2003 Bill Wray. Ren & Stimpy, Wild Thornberrys TM and © Viacom International Inc. This entire issue is © 2003 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.
32
INKING A STEP BY STEP TUTORIAL ON INKING AND STYLE TECHNIQUES BY DRAW! EDITOR, MIKE MANLEY
CARTOONING & ANIMATION AN INTERVIEW AND DEMO WITH STEPHEN DESTEFANO
37
PHOTOSHOP TECHNIQUES A STEP BY STEP TUTORIAL ON ILLUSTRATING IN PHOTOSHOP WITH CELIA CALLE
THE FIGURE IN LIGHT AND SHADOW WITH BRET BLEVINS
78
Figurative interpretation by Bret Blevins
FROM THE EDITOR It’s Spring! And this youngish man’s fancy has turned once again to art and the oncoming Con Season. By the time you read this I will have attended the Wizard show here in my home town of Philly. I will also be attending the San Diego Comicon again this year along with fellow DRAW! contributor Bret Blevins. Keep up on all the news via our web site: www.drawmagazine.com. I’d like to thank once again the great contributors to this issue Bill Wray, Stephen DeStefano, Celia Calle, Ande Parks (whose beautiful wife Cynthia, just gave birth to their son Henry— congrats!) and of course Mr. Blevins, who by the way has a great sketchbook available via his web site: optimisticstudios .com. I’d also urge you to check out Bill Wray’s great site: www.bigblownbaby.com and Celia Calle’s web site: www.celiacalle.com for more great work by these artists. I had to cut the letters page this issue due to space constraints and delay the comic section until our October issue, DRAW! #8. I continue to build out the web site and our message board is a great place to stay in touch for news, see sketches and cool art, or get a critique or pointer from me and some of the other DRAW! contributors. I have uploaded a continuation of my inking tutorial I started in this issue. Thanks for the continued support for DRAW! and we’ll see you this July in San Diego. Best,
Mike Manley, Editor The DRAW! message board is up and running, so please post feedback and ask questions at: http://66.36.6.76/cgi-bin/Ultimate.cgi Here is a shot of a suffering Mr. Blevins from his hotel room last year in San Diego. He’s suffering because he had to go back to the room at night to keep working on his Justice League storyboard, which he begged me to help him with. And what could I do? Those Mai Tais were strong.
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BIG BLOWN BABY TM AND © 2003 BILL WRAY.
Bill Wray is bigger than he’s ever been. He’s huge. Fresh off the One man show of his paintings in Texas, Draw! Editor Mike Manley catches up with the boundary pushing artist. From the glory days of Ren & Stimpy, his own hilarious comic tribute to Jack “KING” Kirby, Big Blown Baby, to Hellboy Jr., his monthly gig at Mad magazine with “Monroe,” Wray remains one of the busiest and funniest artists working in both animation and comics.
THIS INTERVIEW WAS CONDUCTED VIA THE INTERNET AND COPY-EDITED BY THE ARTIST
DRAW!: Tell us a bit about your background, your childhood. Were comics and animation important to you? BILL WRAY: Yes, I lived for Carl Barks, died for Bugs Bunny cartoons and learned to masturbate copying Little Annie Fanny. DRAW!: OK, maybe some things should stay private! When did you start drawing or reading comics? BILL WRAY: I was looking at comics before I could read them.
DRAW! • SPRING 2003 3
CARTOONING
BILL WRAY
DRAW!: So you mostly grew up in California? Do you think the proximity to L.A. helped getting into the biz? BILL WRAY: Oh sure, we had the animation business—the big comic book companies were in New York, but we had cartoons, Western Publishing, Disney, and underground comics up North. Kirby moving out to Sherman Oaks was the real beginning of a West Coast access to New York. When Roy Thomas came out, we had a direct pipeline. DRAW!: Didn’t you live overseas for a while? Vietnam? BILL WRAY: I was an Army brat so we traveled extensively till
shot, so we lived in a French villa. A thunderstorm knocked a huge tree down in our back yard. My Dad had it re-planted upside down and had wood planks nailed to the root mass to from a platform. I would climb up and look all over the whole city of Hue. It rained for months on end in Vietnam; the atmosphere was literally like a river. One day it somehow rained tadpoles. I would see little boys my age leading huge oxen calmly down the street. I attacked a pack of dogs that were zeroing in on my little sister. Hong Kong, that was no big deal, but I had to get rabies shots in the stomach, that was no fun. But I did get a pile of comics after each shot. DRAW!: Wow. Were you getting into comics because of your being away from the American culture? Do you remember being attracted to certain artists or types of art? Did you see any foreign comics at all? BILL WRAY: I liked the same stuff as when I was in the USA: Barks ducks, war comics, Superman, Harvey Comics. I wasn’t into Marvel heroes yet. The comics were sold to G.I.s. I have no memory of any Chinese comics. DRAW!: Were you drawing by this time? Did you ever draw stories or just pictures?
I was about 11. Then we settled in Southern California. We were in Vietnam for about eight months, then we were evacuated during the Tet Offensive. We went to Hong Kong and that was cool, as they had comic book stalls with piles of American comics. I’m still amazed that I was allowed to roam the city alone at the age of nine. Vietnam as well... I could have easily been kidnapped. Maybe that’s what my Dad was hoping for. DRAW!: Obviously this seems like a really powerful memory and time for you. Do you feel it impacted you as an artist in any way? I mean being exposed to this type of situation? War, chaos, new cultures, danger, etc. This really has affected so many important artists throughout history, even in our business. Anytime you met Jack Kirby, you were likely to get some war story. It affected his art strongly. One of the things you are known and popular for, is taking things over the top, pushing the envelope, kicking the sacred cows right in the udder! Do you pull from those childhood experiences and put that in your work in any way? BILL WRAY: A long deep question that I don’t really know the answer for. I was lonely, but never traumatized too badly. I never saw a dead body or had a friend killed. Some quick cut memories: I saw a rabid dog shot in Vietnam. My Dad was a big
4 DRAW! • SPRING 2003
BILL WRAY: At first just pictures—lots of WWII themes, B17’s blowing up Germans and monsters. Later cars. Serious comic book drawing started in high school. I was introduced to underground comics around that time. They made me realize I could do comics, because they were so crude with stories that shocked me more that EC comics did a year or two earlier. My first major comic was my frog characters mixed with Vaughn Bodé’s lizards. The Witzend issue with the Bodé’s cover where the hooded freak is blowing the girl’s brains out blew my mind out, too. Around that time I went to the first San Diego con and found a copy of Rich Corben’s Rowolf. I still remember looking around the room to see if I was going to be arrested or something. That had me going. I never dreamed of beating off to a
CARTOONING
BILL WRAY
comic book until I saw a Corben girl, but when you’re 13.... DRAW!: So reading comics was encouraged in your house? I know you said your dad was an artist.
LOBO ALL CHARACTERS AND ARTWORK TM AND © 2003 DC COMICS
BILL WRAY: My mother gave me Peanuts collections and Tintin albums. She had a flare for art, but put it aside to be a housewife. Later she let me buy underground comics—I don’t know if she knew how raw they were or not. My Dad lost interest in me once I was past the cute toddler stage. When I was about 3 or 4 years old we did do an oil painting based on my child scribbles of sea life. It’s an abstract memory, I think based mostly on a “posed” photo of us doing it together. He helped me one other time when I was twelve; taught me how to draw an engine block when I got into hot rods. A shame he didn’t spend more time showing me drawing tips, as he could have helped me excel and lessened my resentment for his lack of attention. The irony was he wanted to be a teacher, and was an incredible artist. He gave it up for the military because of WWII. That Hitler freak ruined my childhood. DRAW!: So your parents were into comics and were artistic, at least to a fair degree, to be able to pick out some of the best material and expose you to Tintin, Peanuts, etc. Were they more into strips instead of comics? BILL WRAY: My mother just liked those collections. Those are the only ones she gave me. She wasn’t really into comics, she just would be attracted to anything that was the best of its kind. DRAW!: Did you go to art school? ABOVE LEFT: The Wray family in Hue, Vietnam, with servants and father’s assistants. You can’t tell from this angle, but the tree Bill is leaning on is upside-down. LEFT: Young Bill in Costa Mesa, California, about age 10. Bill’s favorite comic then was Turok, Son of Stone. ABOVE: Unpublished page from about ’91, Lobo’s Dog, a one-shot written by Keith Giffen and penciled by Bill that was killed because it had a concentration camp for dogs in the story and many other tasteless moments.
BILL WRAY: I tried, but the teachers at my JC (Orange Coast Collage in Costa Mesa) were into putting TVs into sandboxes and drawing your feelings with ink and sticks on rough wooden planks with your pants off and the rules out the window. People who wanted to learn to paint and draw formally were to be pitied and then shamed into enlightenment. I would bring in Frazetta and Leyendecker books and be openly ridiculed by my teachers for my ignorant desires to do crap. Color, design and lettering were helpful—they couldn’t make up convoluted manifesto for that stuff, but I dropped out and went to work for pro
DRAW! • SPRING 2003 5
INKING
MIKE MANLEY
THE PEN & BRUSH ARE MIGHTIER THAN THE PENCIL
© 2003 BECKER AND MAEYER. ARTWORK © MIKE MANLEY
By DRAW! Editor Mike Manley The job of the inker in comics is probably the most misunderstood of all of the crafts, yet the inkers skill can have the biggest effect on the drawing itself, second only to the penciler. They are called a variety of names from embellisher to finisher—and often very inventive curse words under their breath by many a comic penciler if they botch a job inking a precious bit of drawing. Being both a penciler and sometimes an inker myself of other artists’ work, simply put, inking is drawing in ink with a pen or a brush. It’s not tracing, despite that funny scene in the Kevin Smith movie. After all, once the pencils are erased, the art that’s left is what the inker interpreted from the pencils, good, bad and ugly. I liken the inker to the conductor of an orchestra. The conductor studies a piece of music intensely, and interprets the arrangement of the composer of the original work or musical score. He should have a thorough knowledge of music principles, the original composer’s work, and the various instruments. He knows where the strings come in and how loud they should be. Well that’s what a good inker should do. He or she should be a good artist in their own right, draw well, understand the fundamentals of drawing, composition, anatomy, perspective, line, and have a great skill with the pen and mastery of the brush. Where the penciler fails or there is a question, the inker will have to cover that gap, interpret and add what needs to be finished—be it a black to balance the composition, or to fix an eye, hand (sometimes whole figures) or a bit of off drawing—like a plastic surgeon. Many times I’ve had to fix eyes, add fingers, redraw entire figures (upon request by the editor) and arrange features properly on the face, etc. One of the things I advise younger students or beginners is to draw directly in ink with a pen or a brush. Fill lots of sketch paper with drawings and doodles so you loose any fear of the pen or brush. As you become used to drawing in ink as opposed to just making a slick line, you will begin to draw in ink with an authority and truth. A slick line that does not describe the form in space is just a mark on paper, not a head, or hand, a figure, etc. Diligent practice will quickly build up your skill and confidence. Most young artists feel more confident with a pen as opposed to a brush because a brush takes more skill to master. But once you do, the brush is the most incredible of drawing tools. The variety of line you can make with a brush is endless, much more varied than the pen because of it’s organic flexibility. Every inker or artist drawing in ink has a unique line, like handwriting. I suggest grabbing a selection of pen nibs and brushes and then experiment. Play around with them and see how they react. Like a test drive of a fine sports car, grab some scrap paper and go for a ride in line. You’ll naturally come to find a nib or brush that fits your way of working best. The standard nib that most comic inkers seem to prefer is the Hunt 102. Many inkers are ABOVE: The final inked illustration and the penciled sketch, for a door alarm now also using Pigma and Zig markers, as markers have gotten instruction manual. I loved being able to use the rag to add texture on the cave wall really, really good. But no marker can beat the snap of a good pen and keep the pencils loose so I can keep the inking fresh. or brush, at least not to me yet. 24 DRAW! • SPRING 2003
TOOLS OF THE TRADE A
B
INKING
MIKE MANLEY
PENS After nearly 20 years as a working professional cartoonist, I have experimented and tried many, many different pens and brushes. Through trial and error I have narrowed down my arsenal of tool to a handful.
A) The Hunt 108. It’s probably my overall favorite pen nib. I can get the widest variety of line widths and flexibility. It’s flexible quill gives me a nice thin-thick stroke that’s great for lush pen inking. The nibs are not as good today as they were 10 years ago. It seems the metal they are made of isn’t as heavy a gauge. Every once in a while I get a nib that will last for 10 pages before it snaps, but sometimes they snap after 3-4 pages of heavy comic inking. B) The Deleter Free Penholder and the 200 or 250 pen point. They are larger dowel type points that give you a stiffer pen line, which is good for a steady line thickness. It’s good for doing a lot of heavy classic “hatching” with the pen. They are available from: http://www.omochabox.com BRUSHES Nothing beats a good Kolinsky sable, but they are getting very expensive and I have a batch I bought in the Eighties I’m saving for more personal work. I dole them out like Scrooge giving a raise. But synthetic brushes have also been getting better, and I’ve found a very inexpensive one which works pretty well. The Loew Cornell 795 Round: I use the #2 and #3. It’s not as flexible as a Kolinsky, and the point will wear down fairly fast, in 10 pages or so, but for an inexpensive brush, I recommend it. DON’T THROW AWAY THAT OLD BRUSH! It happens to every brush eventually. It splits, and no amount of brush soap or cleaning can save it. It gets stray crazy hairs which ruins the point and makes it unusable for fine inking. But instead of tossing that old brush into the trash, keep it! Old brushes are great for a variety of things. If they are not split too badly, they are great for filling in large areas of black, which can save a better brush from the hair-splitting punishment. Or you can use them to get some really cool textures, lines and dry brush. Take an razor or utility blade to that old brush and cut it at an angle. You can get all kinds of great textures by doing this.
RAGS I learned to ink or apply texture with a rag or sponge by seeing some art by my friend Ricardo Villagran. He had this page of comic art with this great texture on it. I asked him how he achieved this and he held up this ink soaked dish rag. So grab any old rag, or mom’s old dish towel. You can cut them into smaller pieces for easier handling. The rougher the texture the better., then dab on a bit of ink (I use a dropper or a brush) and then dab the rag with your finger on the paper. Use a few scraps of extra paper and experiment till you find a texture you like. You can also use a sponge to get a similar effect.
HUNT 108 TOWEL OR RAG
COTTON BALL
BRUSH CLEANING TIPS
DRY BRUSH DELETER
My tips on brush cleaning are simple: 1) Keep cleaning the water. I have a big jar next to my desk where I rinse my brush often. I change the water two times or so a day when working. If the phone rings, I take a second and clean out my brush. If you allow the ink to harden in the brush it will ruin the point quicker. 2) If the brush is really dirty, I will take a cap full of rubbing alcohol and roll the brush in it. The alcohol dissolves the shellac in the ink and breaks it up. Then using either brush soap or even hair shampoo (after all, it is made of hair) I wash the brush well and bring it to a point and let it dry. Consistent brush care will help keep a brush for a long time.
DRAW! • SPRING 2003 25
INSTANT CARTOONIST
STEpheN DE STEFANO
INTERVIEW BY MIKE MANLEY TRANSCRIBED BY STEVEN TICE
DRAW!: Why don’t we start at the beginning, okay, and go over your career a little bit. How did you get interested in comics? Did you read comics as a kid? What about animation? Is it something you’ve always wanted to do? STEPHEN DESTEFANO: Okay! Well, I always wanted to be a cartoonist, because I’ve been drawing for as long as I can remember. DRAW!: So you wanted to do comics and cartooning right from the beginning, as a kid? SDS: Yeah, I just loved cartoons. And the good thing was that my oldest brother loved cartoons. My whole family liked cartoons.
nobody said, “I forbid you to be an artist,” or anything like that. They were fairly supportive, yeah. DRAW!: So when did you start drawing? When would you say you really started drawing your own comics or animation or whatever? SDS: Well, gee. I guess my first character was, like, Herbie the Pig or something like that when I was five. [Mike laughs] Or maybe earlier. And then my first super-hero was a character named Fastman, which I was really proud of. That was probably when I was six or seven. And he looked just like the Flash except that he had a cape, which I thought was really spiffy. DRAW!: It made him cooler because he had a cape.
DRAW!: So this interest was genuinely supported by everybody in your family, it wasn’t looked down on...? SDS: I think they didn’t understand it very much, but they knew that it had some notoriety to it and that it was a big business, so 32 DRAW! • SPRING 2003
SDS: Yeah, yeah! Capes made everybody cooler. But, yeah, I was drawing since I was really little. They tell me that when I was three or something that a neighbor would come by and ask me to draw Mickey Mouse and I would do it.
COMICS & ANIMATION DRAW!: Wow!
STEPHEN DESTEFANO
’MAZING MAN ALL CHARACTERS AND ARTWORK TM AND © 2003 DC COMICS
SDS: Well, I dunno. It was just something that I always liked to do. My dad would bring home paper. He used to work at a Ford dealership, and I don’t know what these pads were for, but they were huge pads of paper. And he’d just bring home reams of them and I’d fill them up. DRAW!: That’s similar to my growing up, because my grandmother used to work for Chrysler. She was a secretary there, and she would do the same thing. She would bring me home just tons of old papers and markers, pencils and such, because a big corporation like that is always tossing stuff out.
ABOVE: Probably the only “official” ’Mazing Man size relation chart drawn by the artist.
SDS: Yeah. My dad worked at a Ford dealership as a mechanic, and like I said, I don’t know what these pads were for, but on one side they had a grid that the mechanic would write in, and on the other side they were blank. And by the time I got through with them, they weren’t blank anymore. [Mike laughs]
BELOW: An un-inked page from the first ’Mazing Man Special. A good example of where the artist’s head was at in ’86, and how much his art would change.
DRAW!: Now, did you have favorite cartoons or favorite characters as a kid? SDS: Oh, yeah, absolutely. My favorite characters then are probably still my favorite characters today. Popeye is probably my favorite character, except possibly for Bugs Bunny. And Batman is my favorite super-hero, I loved Adam West and stuff like that when I was a kid. I just thought that was amazing. DRAW!: Well, I think for everybody who’s in our generation— I assume you’re probably somewhere around forty? SDS: Nearly, yes. DRAW!: That was like the coolest thing ever when you were a kid, watching that TV show.
‘MAZING MAN ALL CHARACTERS AND ARTWORK TM AND © 2003 DC COMICS
SDS: Yeah, yeah! And then you grow up a little and then there’s that whole backlash against it, against the camp thing. And I guess I sort of fell in for it, Batman should be serious and it should be really dark and angry and stuff like that. I guess I fell for that for a while, but in my heart I always loved that so much. And now that’s Batman to me. DRAW!: [laughs] And they’re rerunning the Batman show on TV Land. It’s fun to watch them now, as an adult. SDS: They’re amazing! For me, they’re the best representation of super-heroes on film, ever! [laughter] Except for maybe the Fleischer cartoons, the Superman cartoons. DRAW!: Did you seriously start trying to pursue cartooning in any real way in high school? SDS: Yeah! From the time I was thirteen, I was in correspondence with Bob Rozakis at DC Comics, who was the production manager at the time. And I just wrote to him because who wrote comics that I knew? I don’t know why. He wrote the column in
DRAW! • SPRING 2003 33
PAINTING STEP-BY-STEP
BILL WRAY
STEP 5: This is a small Xerox copy of Step 4 with a rough working out of the gray tones as a value study for the painting. Having the value painting clear in your mind before you start your final is essential in illustration to help you create a guide to know where you’re going. STEP 3: Bill takes the faxed pencils and slightly alters the composition again after consulting with Stephen. Then using Sarel transfer paper taped to the back of a recomposed Xerox copy, he traces the image off onto Strathmore 500 Illustration board (Heavy -Vellum).
STEP 4: Bill tightens up the blue pencil with graphite.
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STEP 6: This is a Xerox of the value study with the colors roughed in with Tombo brushes markers. This is a cheat only for an old experienced pro. It’s essential that the beginner do actual studies in paint to help them figure out where they are going, especially in a painting as complex as this one. If you have a short attention span and try to jump to the final without knowing where you are going, you will get as lost as if you are taking a journey to a new land without a map. If you’re not confident of where you’re going, you will end up going in a circle until you create a muddy mess of overworked color.
PAINTING STEP-BY-STEP
BILL WRAY
STEP 7: Ordinarily I paint the entire painting at once, but I this case my scanner was too small to show the entire painting so I did it in sections. I first covered the figures with airbrush frisket paper before I laid in the black and red background color. Step one (of the painting process,) is “laying in” the background. Always work from the back to the front, light to dark.
STEP 8 AND 9: I lay in the flat (mostly) mid-value colors—no blending—just keep it simple, concentrating on getting your values right. Your overall goal is to keep it as simple as possible. The lion and bear are finished, so look to the monkey for your example on this step.
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LIGHTING THE FIGURE
BRET BLEVINS
The Figure in Light and Shadow BY BRET BLEVINS
© 2003 BRET BLEVINS.
T
he variety of possible stylized treatments of light and shadow are virtually without end, but because DRAW! is aimed at the fields of illustration, cartooning and animation as well as traditional art disciplines, this article will present simplified principles of using light to define or dramatize form for visual clarity. Since most drawn imagery (and all commercial art) is intended to communicate with a viewer, the ability to be clear is a handy asset. I’ve included sensitive drawings made only for aesthetic ends, and commercial artwork that serves other demands—their differences must serve as an introduction to the infinite breadth of light and shadow treatments possible in two-dimensional drawing. A deeper exploration of the subject is too vast for the space we have available in this article, but I want to stress the depth of this subject, and encourage you to enhance your picturemaking adventures by further study of the myriad applications of light and shadow found
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throughout the history of representational art. We’ll start with a simple explanation of the visual properties of light as it functions in the natural world; To perceive visual information our eyes are entirely dependent on the presence of light— bright or faint, we must have a degree of light that falls within the perceptive range of our optical organs. In print this sounds absurdly obvious, but stating it is the key to shifting our attention to the framework that an artist must “see through” to effectively organize the light and shadow information. To translate the enormously complex range of shades visible in nature into a compelling drawing an artist must see patterns of light and dark areas in a manner that can be simulated by his drawing medium. Usually this means simplifying the seen information, and understanding the mechanics of light falling on an object is a crucial aid to the simplification process. These two drawings of
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LIGHTING THE FIGURE
BRET BLEVINS
In this three-stage demonstra- ILLUSTRATION 1 tion, the first image has simplified the forms receiving light (from the direction indicated by the arrow) into clean angular planes—the plane that most directly faces the light source will be defined by the lightest tone in your drawing (usually the white paper). As the plane turns at an oblique angle to the light, receiving less illumination, we drop the tone to a middle gray—as the third plane turns away from the light we fill it with shadow. This simple illustration explains an invaluable technique for clarifying what you see and restating your perception into a form that aids drawing. Of course you wouldn’t render every form into this chiseled block structure (though it’s good training to do so), but learning to mentally break the planes apart as ILLUSTRATION 2 you look at an object helps you understand what you see in terms of drawing light and shadow. The second image has softened and melded the planes into a smooth cylinder—but because we’ve noted the changing angles of the surfaces receiving light in the blunt manner shown in the first image, we’re able to blend the tones together and achieve a convincing illusion of roundness. In the final image the cylinders have become the anatomy of an arm and simple shadow shapes convince our eyes we are looking at a human limb. The explanatory floating curved arrows following the form are wonderful tools to help work out the gradations of light on turning surface. I often use these on a piece of overlaid tracing paper to work out a tricky bit of lighting. In the portrait demonstration I’ve constructed a head by building up a structure of planes—the form-following arrows indicate how I was thinking about each change of direction—this allowed me to fabricate reasonably accurate skull, face and neck forms out of my imagination using prior knowledge gained through study and experience. In the second image I was free to focus on refining the details of interior edges and more subtle turns of form (such as the nostrils and eyes) because the big planes were safely in place. Now indicating a direct but soft light toward the left side of the head is a much simpler problem, because I know where the planes are, having made several mental and physical (drawn) excursions over the territory. Although this head is imaginary, having this process behind you is a useful aid in drawing from life, because it helps you understand what you are seeing when you observe actual light on actual forms. The important lesson described in these demo illustrations is more a tool for thinking about what you are seeing (or inventing) than a technique for making a drawing. The only difference between any non-drawing person with normal eyesight and an artist is the special way an artist sorts, interprets and translates seen information into the language of drawing. Learning to make marks on paper is physical and easy—learning to think and see like an artist takes a bit more time and concentration. I can’t stress enough the importance of using your mind more than you use your pencil. It eliminates so much frustration and stress from the drawing process. Anything that reduces frustration is welcome, because our subject is full of other complications; light and shadow can also be arbitrarily distorted to create an endless variety of visual effects and connotations. For the purposes of this article, we’ll divide our topic into two broad areas—light and shadow derived from actual optical mechanics as they function in nature, and invented light and shadow intentionally distorted toward a particular esthetic effect. These two applications can share many rules or none, depending on the image desired—needless to say, this short article can only hint at the endless possibilities. DRAW! • SPRING 2003 79