Sketching week 8 3d round and round! …and old masters on top

Exhausted, the heat is particularly hard on me and 100°F in Paris is horrible: we are not equipped for this: no air conditioning no fan (well, I finally found one in a shop, almost had to fight for it,  but it’s a pretty useless thing) no pool and most of all no air – no wind at all just pollution, red alert for small particles.

I started the week feeling like a 90 year-old and wondering how the hell I was going to do any assignment for Glenn.

Of course this week is a tough one: 2D giving the illusion of 3D in our drawings of people – done on flat paper.

Drawing is a trick, who needs 3D movies and glasses when you can give a sense of depth with a simple pencil?

I decided to try and be intelligent and humble (“for a change” …. who thought that? I heard it!). And look at one of the masters of tri-dimensional characters: André Franquin.

If you are European you know him, if you are American you don’t. Suffice it to say the man was a master, a god to many (me included) the quality of his drawing, the quality of his stories and jokes made him a star of french-belgian comics. (Belgian actually, but french-speaking belgian – sometimes it’s hard to say who is French who is Belgian in a French-Belgian comic, hence the name, plus the fact that you get mixed up countries: the streets of Paris with postmen in Belgian uniform, that kind of thing).

In any case I unearthed my old hard back comics from when I was a kid (well worn books, I read them so many times) and started copying…. and laughing, I have to confess.

When I was 9 years old, I used to do this already: copy Franquin’s work. I’m back at it, but now I know what I’m doing, and I can see the reason behind each line. Not one line is random, every line has a meaning a usefulness. I have to say Franquin went even higher in my esteem, though I did not think there was any room left in the up direction!

I ended up so fascinated and learning quite a few things from pages I knew by heart (or thought I knew by heart) that I copied the characters of about 3 albums (which are 40 pages each).

There is something soothing in copying: you analyse the original, you draw, you correct, you realise the gesture is behind every line…. I woke up from my copying trance on Sunday with a pile of copies and an assignment to send!

I chose the best copies (or least bad), scanned them and put them together in photoshop and sent them as an assignment.

And here it is.

Bear in mind Franquin is a hundred times better than these poor copies:

 

A crowded page hey? and it’s only a tiny part of what I did during the week lol. I seem to have a manic obsessive streak (of course I have: I draw!).

I was worried Glenn would say “this is not an assignment, these are copies” but he did not. He first expressed his admiration for Franquin, then commented on the fact that I clearly tried to get the why and how behind each line. The quality of gesture (lower right: the guy with the M shaped legs) of the action poses works and that shows I “got” what I was reproducing.

I have to say it takes a pretty fierce hand to get those dashing lines – took me a while to get that! And I’m still copying some Franquin as I type. It seems it’s good for me, even if sometimes I laugh so much I almost fall off my chair (some expressions of his characters are incredibly funny).

All legs and arms and trunks have lines going round them, indicating they are 3d….. Saying it is easy, but feeling it and doing it are quite another thing, and thanks to Glenn’s classes I seem to start understanding “something” about it all – I must draw more, sketch more, do more old masters studies (Franquin sadly left us a few years ago, I count him among the great masters).

For those interested: read Gaston volume 13 and Spirou et Fantasio: QRN on Bretzelburg even if you don’t understand French. The series were continued by other artists after Franquin left, forget them.

Funny, I read on facebook a meme saying: “if your 9 year old self saw you today what would he/she say?”

Mine would say: “oh, still copying Franquin? hey, you got really better!!” – thanks to Glenn’s dedication to have us, his students, improve. In the critic, he analysed some of my copies, commenting on why Franquin had done this line, why I had seen it and reproduced it, very comforting to know I got something right. I know that, six months ago I would have missed half of what I saw this time.

I happened to come across some six months old drawings not long ago. I was shocked: they are ok, construction ok, I clearly knew what I did, (after a year and a half with Glenn that is not surprising :-D) but since then I’ve learned a great deal too – and looking at the same time period on my blog (this one you are reading) I realised I made a lot of mistakes that Glenn helped me get over – you can’t learn without making mistakes, you can’t learn to walk without falling first.

The important thing is to have someone pointing you in the right direction so you can pick yourself up and get walking again, even if you have bruised knees.

More soon (more entries in the blog and bruised knees too lol)

Draw everyday boys and girls!.

see you soon.