compo 1 week 7 inhibitions and childhood mourning

The Charlie Hebdo massacre – wont go into the political importance of it here, this is all about drawing. Like all French people (and most Belgians) I knew and regularly read in several papers the drawings of the killed artists.

One of them was particularly  dear to my generation: Cabu, we saw his drawing every week in several papers since we were kids. He was over 70 when they shot him in the head with a kalashnikov, but to us he’ll always be the tall lanky gently older brother who drew on tv shows for kids when we were little. Strangely he had kept his kiddish looks till the end. Imagine Shaggy from Scooby-doo with round glasses.

Like most french people it took me a week to get out of that horrible feeling of “they killed mickey mouse” (or they killed Mad magazine artists plus mickey). I was unable to concentrate or talk about anything else for most of the week, like all my french speaking artist colleagues online. One by one they all did their homage drawing to Charlie (as we came to call the whole lot of victims). Took me a week to get to a point when in under two minutes I did this, and I dont know where it came from, felt like throwing up more than composing a comic page if you know what I mean:

 

 

I had lost so much time  repeating to myself “they shot Cabu?” that I included this page in my composition assignment that I sent to Glenn.

What he had to say was interesting considering the “vomiting” or “no thinking” aspect of how the page came to be: he found it clear, direct, nothing to say about it but good thing – and trust me: Glenn is not one to go easy on you because you are in shock or any other reason, he says what he sees and how to fix it.

But more about this a little below.

I wanted to do something very dark, one light from above, a Mignola or Sin city style page, so I tried and did this:

 

 

The light is all wrong and so is the perspective! There: see what I mean about Glenn telling you what is wrong no matter what 😀 During the live chat and in the critic video he did several demonstrations to me of how the light should work in this setting, so I knew how to redo the page, which I will in the next episode!

Back to not thinking and throwing up drawings.

Space and mass, the topic of the week – frankly I worked on the following while the little voice “they shot Cabu?” went on in my head, and I was not quite there while drawing this – again another thrown up drawing (done before I was strong enough to do the Charlie homage above).  What was I going to draw? oh WTF!

Somehow I found myself with the following, crazy story, crazy character, crazy faces:

 

 

the floor lines lack convergence – argggh! I should have seen it, of course Glenn did not miss it. But outside of that he found it was direct clear story telling again, and told me to persevere in this. He also loved the strange face of the main guy.

Now this leads to a question: does madness aka insanity aka wacky humour aka monty python and co suit me?

I’ve taken a good look in the mirror and have to accept the fact: for sometime, and increasingly I’ve been resisting what was happening: as Glenn had told me I was beginning to find my style – and I resisted it, to put it simply I wanted to be in the Laurence Olivier category and I suddenly found out I was meant to be Buster Keaton category, and I was wondering if people would take me as seriously? Of course I’m cheating a bit here by choosing Keaton, he is recognised as a genius by many, perhaps I should say the Monty Python, they’ll be recognised as genius in about 30 years only.

Food for thought. not surprising considering my interests in humour, drawing styles and which european comics I copied when I was a kid, day after day (Franquin, Eisner…. ) but even if it’s not a real surprise it’s a bit of a shock.

I think I’m going to go with the flow, I’ve spent the last few days before writing this doodling insane heads (more about that next time) and I’ve never had such fun! Who wants to draw like Rubens? I do! But to draw in another style than his!

see you soon for more about all this.

cheerio!!