First a fast recap of C2E2 Comicon in Chicago. It was busy and fun and nothing particularly interesting happened.

 Well, except for a homeless guy whizzing next to a lamp post right after I parked my car. I used to live in Chicago and I have a secret-ish spot I know of near the convention center. Thing is, it's in an area flanked on it's sides by a good neighborhood and a bad neighborhood. On any given year the ole demilitarized zone could have shifted one way or the other. So...the homeless guy relieving himself had me doing some "what's the threat level to my car"  math in my head.



One's first thought would be, the whizzing hobo means...not a great area to park the car. On the other hand...if you're looking to steal a car or contents in it, you're not going to do that in a hobo pissing area, because no one's going to park a good car in that area. You want to do your stealing in an area where people leave stuff worth stealing. So probably safe from car thieves. On the other hand, the impunity in which the homeless guy pulled out his dork leads one to think it's defiantly not a place where there's a big police presence. On the other hand...that means I'm not likely to get a parking ticket for being too close to the fire hydrant.  Then I started thinking about the manner in which the guy whizzed. Aside from it being in public, it was just normal whizzing. He wasn't whizzing while talking to the lamppost, nor whizzing in a weird pattern via some specific meth fueled purpose.

I ended up just staying that spot and disconnecting the car battery. Ya can't steal it, if you can't start it. That pro tip right there may one day make this entire email well worth opening. Car thieves bring tools to steals cars, not to reconnect batteries, nor will they bother hanging around long enough to figure out that's why it's not starting.

Other than that, not much to report. Thanks to everyone who came by! Sold lot's of books, and a boatload of prints for some reason.  We're talking like 3 or 4 times what I usually sell there. I'm not sure why or what it means for anything but I completely sold out of several of them that I thought would be stocked up for the year. It was weird... My focus is always on my comics, I bring prints because that's what you do and some people like them, but I don't, nor did I, put any focus on them. I dunno. I had a moment of concern, because the universe does like to balance itself out, that I'd get to my car and see an amount of vandalism had been done, equal to the extra dough I made on the prints.



But no...car was fine.

With the disposition of my last blog still engaged...I reminded myself that who you deal with and surround yourself with is very important. Their attitude, level of enthusiasm, can affect yours. It can become a perpetual motion machine in one direction or the other. You wanna be around people who understand what "awesome" means, and/or want to do cool stuff. So I talked to my buddies at First Comics, and Dinesh and some of his folks at Bad Idea...and that was about it, as far as me dealing with my "peers". It was all a breath of fresh air of "here's what we're doing next! what are you doing next?!". People with a purpose...vision...knowwhatimean?  Some other time I'll explain specifically what I mean by "understanding what awesome means". A shorthand example is this- you with a 3x5 banner with your name on it and your drawing of someone else's intellectual property, in a section of 500 other people with the same set up...not awesome. A life sized construction of your character that fans can take pictures next to...awesome.

Back to prints being such a hit seeming strange. I remind you, I consider myself a comedian first and an illustrator second, and truth be told I never really did learn how to draw. I say that often and people look at me like I grew a second head. It is however true.

All of this here, where you convert organic shapes into geometric shapes in order to plan out the figure...



Yeah...I don't know any of that. To be painfully honest, I never even learned any of this (below), and that's chapter one of a figure drawing book I got when I was like 20. This might be the second time I opened it.



It's like this see...three lifetimes ago when I worked in a garage, I had a "training period".

This did not entail night school or taking any classes on the fundamentals, it entailed me following a giant Mexican fellow around (who was sweetheart of a man who always, though he pretended it was not his doing, made sure the local lunch spot gave me extra portions because he knew I was single and pathetic) and learning how to do things as things came in. A car comes in that needs front breaks, I'd learn how to do front breaks. When one came in that needed new CV joints, I'd learn that. It was a busy shop and the priority was to get the work that came in done, so I keep the job.

Thus, I never really learned fundamentals. I can go on a pipe bending machine and fabricate an entire exhaust system for you car...but I couldn't tell you why the exhaust back pressure matters in the first place.

Same goes for me and drawing, "get work done so I keep the job".  This entire time I've been learning what was needed at the moment for whatever panel or story I was doing.  I can draw the NASA moon lander and space suits, but I couldn't tell you how the collar bone attaches, or how high up.


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That being understood, one of my blind spots is actual figure drawing, more specifically the female figure. For one thing, as a kid drawing stuff for fun I was drawing spider man or GI Joe...not She Ra. So right from the start I was in one lane. Secondly, I haven't had to learn because I haven't had a whole lot of female characters in A.L. That was due to momentum, not design.  Early I on HAD a story line "Dottie and Liquid Sam" which I loved, but no one GAF about it...


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Voodoo Joe, Edgar the Census Agent and soon Baron Von Donut where the stories that hit.  And you go with what the audience is responding too, not what you THINK is working. Female characters show up of course, and Baron Von Donut's love interest gave me some practice.

But I never really had to be more than semi-competent, because they were not driving the story. If the punch line is something Voodoo Joe is doing, you can just avoid putting the female character in any posture or position you're not comfortable drawing. His body language will, 9 time out of 10, be what the composition of the panel or page is relying on. And it'll be his body language that has to be specific and correct. The instances where the female character's body language is key were rare enough that I could struggle for an absurd amount of time to get right. If I have one page that relies on Ms. Mango's body language (such as below) I can alot myself enough time to struggle through it. It's only one page out of however many.



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However, now one of the primary characters is a waitress. So now...I do need to get down to basics and get competent at female figure drawing.

A few options here. I could take a life drawing class, which seems a bit absurd. I'm not paying to take a drawing class, I've been a professional illustrator for several decades...I don't have that kind of money. I could get some woman I know to come over and pose. But that generally ends up with not much drawing getting done. We're all adults here. You have two heterosexual people alone, one of them is down the their underwear...things are inevitably going to take a turn BECAUSE, in 5 minutes her back is going to hurt or she'll be cold, I don't want to draw in the first place...not long before one or both of us starts thinking " I bet if I put on a little charm, I won't have to keep doing this".



SO plan C, 20 minutes a day just sketching from pictures. Getting reference pictures is a whole other can of worms. If you've tried searching for anything in the last 2 years you will know that search engines have become  worthless. You don't get what you are actually looking for. You get an AI explanation of the subject, what google thinks it can sell you, and the top 20 search results from what the rest of the internet was trying to find with the same keywords.

You have to try to outsmart the f*cking search engines in order to find what you are searching for...this is the world we created.   

  I needed b/w pictures (easier to notice the structure of things if it's b/w) of preferably skinny women ( again, I need to get my head around the bone structure). So, I need a search that'll give me skinny women, not wearing much...BUT one that's not going end up giving me several pages of images of porn or starving Ethiopians, or worse, and I guarantee you that's what google had up it's sleeve.  SO, I searched "pre-code movies".



Pre-code referrers to movies from 1926-ish to 1933-ish. It's just what it sounds like, movies before there was any ratings system or review board saying what you could or could not put on screen. As long as you weren't running afoul of actual pornography laws, you could "do as thou wilt".  Maybe the greatest era of cinema ( Dracula, King Kong, Frankenstein were all pre-code) and it was plenty sleazy. They took every opportunity to have actresses in tight skimpy outfits or in their underwear, AND it was right in the middle of the great depression so everyone was thin because they couldn't afford to eat. Perfect!

 With an added bonus of a lot of musical numbers with dancing ( giving me more interesting poses to attempt to draw).

This took me into the online realm of whatever octogenarians are still above ground and can use a keyboard. and let me tell you...they love their Clara Bow. The search was rotten with Clara Bow pics. The IT girl then, apparently.  As near as I can make out she was in 7000 movies, batting her flapper eyelashes at the camera to the delight of every man who had 10 cents for a movie ticket.




They thought SHE was all that?! They deserved to go through the great depression. Or maybe that's what neutered their self esteem so much that her so-so girl next door looks was what they were drooling over. Pfft. Clara Bow. Who give a f*ck about Clara Bow when ya got Myrna Loy? am I right?...or Thelma Todd or Bebe Daniels...yeaaaahhhh...Bebe Daniels...you know what I'm talking about.

No...I don't know what you are talking about, because I'm not 108 years old.



 ...or or hell Claudette Colbert if you want someone with unintimidating looks. Me, myself, personally...give me BeBe Daniels, all day long. Her best role was in the original Maltese Falcon.



You've seen the remake with Humphrey Bogart, which was overrated in my opinion. The whole fun of "Noir" movies is that everyone is sleazy and underhanded. And Bogart can't pull that off. At no point did I buy the notion that he was sleeping with is partners wife.

See, this pair on the left...I believe are into each other, and would be more than happy use manipulation to get what they wanted, The pair on the right has all the chemistry of someone trying to fight off intoxication and someone waiting for her to pass out.




Sure, the Bogart version had Peter Lorre in a great supporting role, but the two leads had zero chemistry.


Who?... Can I remind you it is 2025, and no one you are writing to here is in a nursing home, thus are not interested in a review of a 80yr old movie

Peter Lorre... for f*cks sake, he was basis for the voice of Ren, from Ren and Stimpy!

...you wanna know something that was upsetting from the comicon in Chicago? I brought up this same topic to my trusted adjutant Sion, who is 19, and he had no idea who Peter Lorre was (that's fine) AND had also never see a single episode of Ren and Stimpy. His answer in both cases was basically "before my time...I think my Dad brought it up once".  My jarring realization was...that to an 19yr old, a cartoon from the 90s and a movie from 1945 are both in the same category- OLD. There's no sub categories of old...there is just now and old. I am..to their minds not just old, but worse than that...I, my Dad, Humphrey Bogart, are all in the same category- "OLD".

I don't...feel old.

You don't?  You've spent half this blog now talking about movies from 1930..

oh yeah! Bebe Daniels...ohhh baby...

Anyways...I got a bunch of pics and have been doing 20 minutes a day of figure drawing...to not very impressive results.



Sure, It's better than you can do, maybe...but theoretically I'm a professional, and that up there is a mess. Below is my rendition of Clara Bow...in hopes that satisfies the search engine gods. Not good, but the fingers turned out interesting.



...and one below of Fay Wray from King Kong. Which actually ain't too bad for a sketch.



What I'm doing (doing wrong) in these first few days is drawing to replicate the picture. I'm drawing what I see instead of understanding what I'm seeing. Counter productive. You've seen maybe stuff like this (below) where the drawings are begun with a quick framework of the posture....
 


...i don't know how to do that, but that's what I should be doing.

What I'm working towards is getting the figure's structure to become second nature. A simple cartoony style like I have really leaves very little room for error in the fundamentals. A simple style has less details to fill the eye with to hide incorrections. It either feels right or it doesn't.  Bruce Timm is a great example of that... very few lines but exactly correct, and feels just as alive as a realistic illustration.





Also, the figures I draw have to seem natural in the rest of the specifically stylized world I draw. I can't have abstract cartoonish guy next to semi realistic women, it'd be conspicuous and take you right out of the world. It all has to be at the same level of abstraction for everyone and everything on the page

...a Bruce Timm example again, since no one does that better than him...

 

No other way to get it dialed in than to practice until it's second nature.

Going to point out something here in some of my sketches...that I also see other illustrators do, and I think is a bad habit, BUT for all I know that's what they teach you to do. I'm speaking of, when you sketch...making many small lines as you go, instead of one singe confident line.  I don't mean redundant lines, like when you scribble...uhm...see how the red circled is many small strokes to manufacture a long line, and lines circled in blue are just one single stroke of the pencil..you can make it out best on the leg....



It's a lack of confidence in the line your drawing... you are thinking instead of drawing. That leads to madness. At some point you have to turn your brain off and let your instincts/talent do their thing, and let them recalibrate and learn.

The other reason its a bad habit is simple mind/muscle training. You're training you fingers to draw tiny lines, instead of long lines. and when you ink...you can not do that, you need to be able to do the whole line all at one.  So, it's like practicing the 40 dash constantly when the main event is a marathon. 

In any case, after a few weeks I started getting...slightly more competent.





Those are a little more respectable but going down the road of more semi realistic, than an abstract shorthand I'm trying to develop.  These here below, the most recent, are getting there. They are starting to look like I drew it, as opposed to just drawings...if that makes sense.



Those two on the right are definitely down the correct road. Actually this one below, though not as well rendered, is really me more properly hitting the mark. It's got charm...feels a bit more a live, like characters not drawings.




It's been about a month. I do feel a little more confident but not much. I'm onto the pages with the waitress as we speak so...let's hope some of this practice did take root.

Anyways, we'll see if once it's done, we can see any progress compared to pages before I started trying to get serious ...