if I were to sum up the hour and a half, fantastic demo that Glenn did as a course for this las week of compo 2, I would…. well, simplify things to a absurd level. Yet it’s not entirely false to say the assignment of the week is: (in my words, not Glenn’s!!) “take any old random sketches and see what you can compose with them”.

Oh boy! so we are to start with pre-existing, unrelated, not meant to be used with others, drawing and build something meaningful with them… as Big Tought would say “tricky….” but indeed an interesting puzzle, forget forgetting the story, forget thinking of all the composition elements, just manage with whatever you have!

I grabbed an old sketchbook of mine, I was about to scan it when I thankfully remembered I had already done so. These are all about a year old, done quickly in the street (partially with a 5 year old girl lying over my shoulder, putting her fingers everywhere on the paper “who is that, and this one? Can I borrow your pen?” “NO YOU CANT BORROW MY PEN!” of course I said it in a very gentle fashion but the idea of a 1908 made vintage pen in the enthusiastic hands (fists, let’s be honest) of a 5 years old made me cringe. 😀 Funny how kids are attracted to people drawing, always take spare paper and cheap colour pencils with you, it’s a trick that has saved me and my old ultra flex pen more than once! 😀

In any case I took about a month’s worth of street sketching and put it all in one file in photoshop. Of course I threw some away., rearranged them a thousand time, always trying to thing why do this or do that, what is this gesture leading towards, is it leading to another moving gesture hat guides the eye?(Glenn is a cunning teacher!) and added some rough and quick colour to the whole. Here is the result:

Glenn, to my surprised liked it a lot even if he was surprised too by the panoramic/no scenery aspect of it.

According to him it works, one movement of an arm leads to another, there is a well define foreground midground background, clear groups and a direction to them and the laws of perspective (never easy with a crowd) are spot on.

So I finish this composition 2 advanced class happy, feeling Istill have tons to learn but I’m starting to get what my problem is: I see composition in my head as being far more complex and tricky that it is once you’ve “got” it.

For this reason I’m redoing composition one (and then 2 after that) knowing that the big advantage with courses by a real master like Glenn is that listening twice to the same words he says about something – you hear something else because you’ve changed by following his instructions the first time (plus he keep adding tons of new stuff to each class all of the time. Also god news: redoing a class means half price!  sweeeeet!

I’m going to go on doing this blog, knowing that my second go at compo1 will be very different because I’ve changed, learned a lot, and also i’m going to center my composition around things I need for my comic in the making (perhaps even entire pages of it, we’ll see)

so see you soon and please let me now if you have any request.

The new semester start november the 10th – join us! there are super payment plans (a great thing!) and please dont tell me “oh Im not good enough to work with Vilppu” – Glennis there to help his students, whatever their level, and he loves people with no or little experience in drawing cause that means he wont have to make them forget bad habits!

Hey, the classes are made to get you get better at drawing, the goal is not to impress Glenn (which would be difficult I think LOL)

so join us and see you real soon in this blog in any case

Anton