Hopelessly Lost, But Making Good Time #98

By Pam Bliss
June 15, 2009

Hello, and welcome back to "Hopelessly Lost ..." the series about making your own comics for people who are in it (at least in part) because we love the simple act of drawing, and for everyone else who tilts their heads and asks the immortal question: "Is that supposed to be a dog, then?"

We can talk about storytelling, and about narrative structure, about character and plot and theme, but all of those apply to every kind of fiction, from novels and short stories to screenplays and theatrical plays, and epic poetry for that matter. What distinguishes comics from all these other forms of fiction is the drawings.

Now some of you may be comics writers, collaborating with artists to create your finished works, and that's cool. This essay isn't particularly aimed at you, though I hope you still might want to read it, if only for whatever insights it might offer into the work life of your co-creators.

The rest of you, you cartoonists and writer-artists and pencilers and inkers and other denizens of the drawing board, listen up. This one's for you.

Practice, Practice, Practice

A colleague of mine was in New York earlier this year and somebody actually stopped him in the street and asked him how to get to Carnegie Hall. Never being one to resist a blatant setup, he of course told them to "practice, practice, practice."

The questioner looked at him as if he had grown a third head. Let's hope this was simply a matter of a tourist from another culture who isn't familiar with ancient American jokes, and not someone who just plain doesn't get it. But I have my doubts. Recently I've met several young cartoonists who say they never practice drawing.

It's not that they don't draw; they draw a lot. It's just that with personal websites and blogs and journals and art display sites of all kinds, they are thinking of every drawing they do as finished work, or potential finished work. With the lure of instant distribution on the Internet, everything gets scanned, polished, and often colored, and goes online to be seen by everyone.

For these modern cartoonists there is no such thing as a drawing you don't show anyone. They have no privacy to practice, to learn, to experiment, and to fail. Granted, it's possible that privacy isn't something they value; just because I'm shy about letting other people see my less successful experiments doesn't mean other people have to be.

But I think something must be lost when every single crummy drawing has to be "cleaned up" digitally and made to look as much like an ideal comic or a fragment of one as possible. If nothing else, the whole process may not be the best use of your time. Is it better to spend two hours polishing one drawing or to spend the same two hours making a half dozen drawings on scrap paper or in the pages of your sketchbook?

It depends on what your purpose is. If you are making the cover of a comic, or an important pinup or display drawing, then two hours is barely enough time to get started. But if your goal is to master a technique or a tool, or really internalize a character design, or just find out what kind of images are floating around in your imagination, then it's better to draw a lot, fast.

If you polish a drawing that is fundamentally flawed, you are in effect practicing all the mistakes that you made when you drew it. If you leave it be, and draw some more, you at least have a fair chance of making some new mistakes.

Draw, Draw, Draw

Draw, draw, draw; don't be shy or ashamed. If it's not good enough for other people to see, then they don't have to see it. Don't show anyone. But don't be vain enough to think that a drawing nobody else ever sees is not an important drawing. You make finished comics for an audience, to entertain or enlighten or communicate or share, but there's nothing wrong with making drawings just for yourself. I might even go so far as to say it is necessary, at least if you want to learn fast and have your drawings improve at full speed.

The traditional medium for these practice drawings is a sketchbook, and I'm old fashioned enough that that's what I use. I think there's a lot to be said for sketchbooks, particularly the hardcover kind. They are sturdy enough to carry around, and easy to store in bookcases for further reference once they are full.

But I have heard people say that decent sketchbooks are "too nice" and that it seems a shame to waste them by drawing in them. To which I say, not so: you are never wasting paper when you draw on it with the pure intent to draw well. Even if you fail, the effort is worth the expense.

But if that argument fails to move you, or if your budget is limited or you simply find sketchbooks too rigid and formal, then loose paper works just as well. It does require some management, but a three hole paper punch and a three ring binder or two will take care of that. You can always arrange your sketches in chronological order; they'd be that way in your sketchbook, anyway. But the binder system also allows you to experiment with other forms of organization, and keep all your drawings of the same characters, or the ones for a single project, in one sequence.

To get paper for your binders, you can raid your own scrap pile: all studios seem to accumulate plenty of dud copies and computer hard copy that's no longer needed. I use this scrap for writing and taking notes — the first draft of this essay was written on the back of a misprinted minicomic — and there's no reason you can't draw on it as well. Or, if you prefer a clean sheet for each drawing (and I don't blame you if you do), a case of decent quality printer paper holds ten reams, which is 5,000 sheets — enough paper to keep you going for many years for a relatively small outlay. If you want a particularly nice surface for drawing with wet media or markers, spring for the 24-pound paper.

And remember, if you draw on it, you aren't wasting it.

The Benefits of Practice: An Example

I never thought I was a particularly good inker. I hated it for years: writing the stories, designing the characters, laying out and penciling the pages, that was what I liked doing. Inking was a chore at best, and a chance to ruin my carefully crafted pencils at worst.

I don't remember when the transition came and I started to really enjoy inking, but it was sometime after I discovered the cartridge-fed brush pen, and most particularly after I started drawing with one in my sketchbook. I didn't draw over pencils there, but started drawings and worked them up just with the brush, freehand. I'm convinced that is what taught me to handle the tool, and that in turn led to the breakthrough in my inking.

The only thing that will teach you to draw in ink is drawing with ink. Practicing freehand encourages you to vary your strokes, and the freedom from the tight effort of following the penciled line will give you confidence and loosen up your hand and wrist. Eventually you will come to a kind of instinctive understanding of which motions produce which type of line, and this will make you a better inker when you next encounter a penciled page.

It was the practice, and most particularly the unplanned, unfinished, unseen-by-others sketchbook drawings, that taught me most of this. I hope the same will be true for you.

Next time: More stuff.
Until then, draw something every day.

Pam Bliss has been making comics since 1989, and the minicomic, in all its infinite variety, is her favorite form. Her cartoon short stories are set in the perfect Midwestern small town, Kekionga, Indiana, where just about anything can happen. Her new ongoing series, KEKIONGA, explores the mysteries of that most mysterious place through the eyes of an innocent young superhero. For more about all the Kekionga stories, visit www.paradisevalleycomics.com. Or, for updates on work in progress, essays on storytelling and other subjects, auto industry comments and random stuff, including a thrilling weekly adventure serial, read Sharkipede's LiveJournal No Silver Cars at http://www.livejournal.com/users/sharkipede/.

Paradise Valley Comics
No Silver Cars
Sparky's Minicomics Tips:
- Part One
- Part Two