Anton von Flugelhorn – Studying online with Glenn Vilppu, an adventure in art!

composition 2 second time week 1 and 2 for the price of one

Not good enough damn it not good enough! as captain Picard said in Startrek TNG.

If your remember well (and if you dont a reminder is coming up) during my second time doing composition one I had “found” my style: loony toony, very french-belgian comic in style (not a surprise as I’m french and grew up on them).

Glenn was super happy for me, he had given me hell during my first go at composition 1 and 2 (which was ok, I’m a big girl :-D) and it paid: during my second go at compo1 I decided to do only comic pages and  came my style, easy, fun to do, far from perfect but it’s “me” as Glenn put it.

You’ll see a spread of that style below but read this first: I love writing comedy, nonsense, Monty Python like stuff and Franquin (google the man!!!) style.

But even any improvement in my “more classical drawing styles” would of course improve my cartooning (my hands and feets are yuk). So this semester I took (again) figure drawing one, deciding to draw only clothed females as I am not good with drapery and I have problems drawing girls that dont look like third rate drag queens (no insult meant to any drag queens, most of you are more feminine than I’ll ever be and are dream models for sketching!). Like many other heterosexual female artists I have problems drawing anything that is not muscular squared-jawed… ok, I prefer to draw men, so I absolutely must draw female. So there I signed for figure one and composition 2 (“again” for both)

I started drawing draped girls during the recess week before the new semester. I was not sure what I’d do for compo 2, and then I noticed: heavy black/heavy white, no other color…. one of my girls was black and white, no borders… think Hugo Pratt (Corto Maltese) Frank Miller (Sin City) or even Eisner though he always used washes.

Two colors, zero or one, like in machine language, what goes black what goes white…. I took some model pictures in full light, full color, your normal pic, and tried to imagine: reducing to two colors while maintaining the “readability” of the image.

Useless to say it took me hours for each and gave me a headache each time, this is a maddening exercise! But the 5th one was a little bit easier than the first…. hmmm perhaps there is something there! So I sent some of my “heavy black” drawings as I call them to Glenn along with the rearrangement of the compo1 week ten assignment.

So here is my schizophrenic assignment sheet of week one:

ok, yeah I know there are “some greys” I could not decide for some zones if they should be white or black.

Glenn was very positive about both things (except the scenery in b&w in the middle that is unreadable) and told me to pursue that new style, it would improve my cartooning cause it would force me to have a better understanding of shapes.

At the moment, needless to say I cannot do this style from imagination, the cartoon-like one I can and very easily do. So let’s get to work.

Week two (hey I told ya: two weeks for the price of one! isn’t that a corny way of hiding i’m late by one week in my blog? lol)

I decided to see if I could do figures on a complex scenery and keep it all readable, make it something that is not a mess of black spots on white paper.

Broadway! Let’s do that, with the posters etc… except of course i’ve never been there, but I found a series of old colour daylight pics and got to work.

Hours! some bits took me hours. But let’s look at it so I can give you examples of how incredibly courageous I am in facing this ordeal (lol).

I went the cheap way: panel three is stolen from last week, panel two is a close up of panel one.

Panel one was my hell on earth for a week!

Look at the second panel, you’ll see a better example. Ok two silhouettes: the guy with the hat – how do I make sure the hat doesn’t get mixed up with the theatre posters in the distance? there is black over there too! also, no border for his right shoulder: white on white, but it’s ok cause you know it’s a human so you read him as having a shoulder. The edge of his right arm… now that took me some time: at first I made the windows of the cab white with thin black reflection, as “should” be,  but who cares about “should”? I needed black to give that arm a contour, guess what? it works. But what doesn’t work and Glenn did not miss, are the white scratches-like things on the doors of the cab, too rough, don’t read. Also he told me the building in the distance (the V shaped one, is that an hotel of famous landmark?) could do with a bit more black or thicker lines.

The main thing is: forget about reality! fake it, cheat, but remain within the boundaries of the believable. For example did you notice that the light on the umbrella and on the man wearing coat are contradictory? Probably not, and that’s what you find in most “noir” comics: fake lights that you only notice if you are either an art teacher looking for errors or if the story is so boring that you start thinking while reading. It’s ok, it’s the way it’s done and has always been done…. and it’s freaking difficult! If it was all about copying reality it would be soooo cool, but it’s about reinventing it.

I type this in the middle of my third week and I am very dissatisfied with myself: ok it’s heavy black and readable and realistic… and realistic BORES me! I don’t mean I want cartoony stuff all the time, but some exaggeration, some caricature, amplification (Rembrandt did it so well: his portraits are NOT realistic, but you dont realise it when you look at them). I have to find….. something more. And right now it’s escaping me and I’m wasting my time throwing away brush work that looks like…. nothing! We’lI see what the near future brings, I’m sure Glenn will have the key to all of this for me, he already gave me a clue during the chat: more angle on men, less on women… hey, yeah that’s a good point for this style!

See you real soon!

Black is my favourite colour btw.

Anton

compo 1 week 9 how wacky can you get?

It’s decided: I’m going to let my true nature – whatever it is – out and let my assignment be what it wants to be.

I have to say I did not expect something so crazy to come out – and to come out ery very easily and naturally. Am I a Toon like some friends of mine say?

In any case, here is item A, your honour, as they say in court-room dramas:

Yes I know: it’s insane, but it feels very natural to me, probably because I grew up on nonsensical humour from french-belgian comics, monty python and Goon shows (nothing to do with “the goon” radio show of the 50s, research it, you’ll go mad too and get pain in you stomach muscle laughing so hard)

Glenn found it clear and perfect in terms of story telling (I’m proud of the way the action starts in a world where things are different from ours, but I keep the reader up to date on what that universe is like in one dialogue in one panel).

The pacing is great (again I’m proud of the bit about the underside and upper side of the “andian overhang” it was not easy choosing which moments of the action to show to make it understandable)

Glenn had one thing to say that was negative: my characters (outside of the silouhete of our faceless hero) are drawn quickly and without care, something I can do and indeed do every week in the head class (in which I’ve also specialised lately in carefully rendered toonish heads)

If I can draw a cartoon cleanly I should do it in my comics too!

true and logical. I know what to do for next week.

And expect to see again those two flyboys and their rebel butterflies, I’m preparing a web comic and they will be part of the world I’m building (yes it will be totally insane yet logical in it’s own…. well, Shakespeare put it better than I could: there is method in my madness! 😀

Before the end of the week you’ll get the last installement of this ten week caurse, cause next week I start doing for the second time the part two of the composition class.

My first time around, compo 1 and 2 proved a nightmare, I did not get what it was about, and Glenn, knowing that I had a thick skin was merciless with me (I think his Finn ancestry makes him a bit “too the point”) but I have passed through the difficulty that I was creating myself by holding myself back: toon toon toon! ok baby you wanted to be a great painter? you can still be one, but your real call is cartoon.

Remember how Conan Doyle was annoyed that Sherlock Holmes took too much importance compared to his real litterary work. As the British library boss in charge of his work said: “WHAT real litterary work?”

see you in a day or two

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!!

Compo1 again week 5 the electrifying tale of a button and an apple pie

Last week we dwelt with different point in time, this time we deal with an action about to be done. I would add: that is quite obviously going to be done, if or buts about it. The beautiful paintings of masters that Glenn showed and analysed for us are for the most part about Saints getting their heads cuts by bad guys and other charming things.

Let’s not forget that until the renaissance the Catholic church was the main all encompassing client for artists, the super Major of its days. I guess that after painting your 23 crucifixion you must be a bit fed up with the topic, and, even if you are a deeply religious artist you must die to paint something else, another scene from the life of Christ or from the life of a saint: like a saint having his insides torn out (like in Braveheart), killed with arrows, having his tongue pulled out…. yes I know, you stopped eating while reading this. In short most of the early renaissance paintings  (my point of view) is about tortures, and after that about ancient greek Gods that never existed (ever heard of the inquisition?) but come with a lot of new stories: rape, battles, monsters, torture and…. ok just forget what I said: torture paintings sell, it seems. lol

The problem I’ve had with this temporal friendly topic should not be a problem: this time I’m doing a comic page, a sequential art (temporal!) so it should be easy-peasy. But doing a whole page about something that only happens in the last panels but that the reader sees coming from the very start is not easy: the danger is falling into clichés like:Wiley Coyote is about to cross the road, no cars, he carefully looks left, carefully looks right, no cars, he takes one little step and VROOOOOM a big truck coming out of nowhere flattens him. It’s fun because we see it coming but it’s been done so many times in animation and by people who are geniuses compared to me…. what was I to do?

Before answering this question (change of topic to maintain tension, made popular by Lucas in the first Starwars movie – yes I’m doing my homework about image and story!)  let’s see what I did with the two works I kept on the drawing board from last week and the week before.

First my salute to Eisner “it’s the Ghost!” “yeah and by Anton Von Flugelhorn” shame me 😀 Glenn told me to use more alternances of clear and dark, and to put the figures not all as the same distance from each other (which is a drawing killer).

I came up with this:

Much better according to Glenn, clearer too in the body language but….. I did it again: most of my characters are at equal distances from each other. Insert curse words of your choice here. Glenn told me and….. I thought I was doing what he was saying while doing the contrary again!

Ok, I know what to do next time….. I hope.

My other “old” work to improve was my 4 panels soldier story. Glenn found it too flat, horizontal, hard to read.

Redid it all:

My table is now giving a sense of depth ti the image, the images are clearer but…..  last image: the dog is under the table but his ears are in front of it, make up your mind Anton! I did not see that and of course Glenn did not miss it (he misses nothing!)

Another thing that worries him is the realistic developped quality of panel two compared to the rough (this is a rough) quality of the rest of the page.

The truth is: I started drawing the helmets and “saw” at once what the shadow would look like on the soldiers faces. But I did not consider the relation of that panel style to the rest of the page. Could have done it on purpose (in japanese manga you often get cartoony heros  in the middle of a realistic scenery etc. But here it’s not a planned thing and frankly does not work. I know what to do next time!

Now, back to our first action (swipe-fadeout of the image in your mind, a trick remade popular by mr Kirshner in the second Starwars movie… did I’m mention I’m a total Trekkie? anyway…)

It’s about to happen and nothing will stop it.

For once let me tell you my plan, then show you the comic page then tell you what Glenn (like other people) who did not know what the story was read in this said comic page.

I decided to do a “I cant resist pressing that button precisely because there is a panel about it saying “dont press the button” I’m too curious”.

Now, here is what I did with it (sorry for the yellowish tone, my digimarc would not work on a white backgroud)

Is it funny? Does it make sense? I guess it might if you know it’s about a button but Glenn (and others, I tested scientifically this page on innocent subject) did not know that round thing in the wall was a button and the “closeup” of the button and panel about it mentioning that it is indeed a button is too small to be read or to be noticed (which is far more serious).

Glenn read the button as a pie that the guy put the finger in (a french person read it as a camembert the the guy put his finger in…. that still does not explain his being electrocuted. lol

The panel with the close up is the thing! (to paraphrase Hamlet – what is Shakespeare doing here? no idea) I have to make it unmissable, clear, probably make the button smaller (it *does* look like one big apple pie)

To sum up this week I’ve learned to always be on my toes: how is my panel working in relation to the others, ok I think I’m being clear about something, or putting people at different distances from each other, guess what:  what I think I do and what I do are two different things! What is important is what happens in the mind of the reader, this means testing your page or your drawing on someone who knows nothing about it before hand.

A good week of learning!

We are on vacation in that week six assignments will be due on the 4th of january, see you then, and until then let it draw let it draw let it draw !

A.

I added 2 updates in the few days before this one, so if you were not around, check them out to get what I’m talking about!!

Without claiming, like Eddie Izzard, does that “I have a common point with Leornardo da Vinci” (which, in his case is: like da Vinci he has designed a helicopter that doesn’t work – impressive I must say!) I would like to rejoice publicly that it SEEMS I finally begin to understand what this is all about! (“all” being composition and not helicopters that dont work).

Last week my work was boring, plain, meh, and any other expression that might express the fact that what I did was not exciting, did not cause curiosity or even amusement, and that the world would not see any difference if it did not exist, even on the micro level.

Well, it seems that I’ve taken a step forward: “enormous progress” dixit Glenn Vilppu – yeah! my helicopter doesn’t work any better that Leo’s: at long last my compo begins having some meaning and do it’s rightful job!

here are the things:

Ive added depth in the sea story, panels of an odd size or angle and or placement to give some interest to the page as a whole and reflect the state of mind of the character. in the desert scene the mountains behind lead the eye to the characters. The punk versus old fat ladies I redid completely, trying to make a movie out of it, you even get a panel in which there are two of the same character as she (the pink lady) ducks under the window to observe her nemesis.

Glenn liked it al!  desert was in it’s last week of work so it’s over for that one, he thought it was a big improvement on the previous version.

The ladies versus punk made him laugh (the “rat” panel I think :-D) and he did not find anything to change in it (WTF!!!!! yeah!) I asked if I was suppose to rework on it – answer: no. As for the sea story he suggested perhaps a more pointy shape for the panel introducing the place, and perhaps a closeup on one of the dead guys but he did not seem adamant about it. (one man’s opinion he called it) he loved the angles, the depth, the page and compo.

Oh my Dog I’m progressing at long last! 3 comic pages, 3 “OK”s from Glenn, can’t tell how much I’m happy, seems all my hard work and studying storyboards finally paid.  (‘comics’ structure are too dependent on their genre to be easy to study – you dont build a super hero page of the golden age the way you build a modern superhero or Maus or Sin City, I do study Eisner who is my idol but I dont feel like imitating him, just wish I could, his style is his, and any imitation would immediately be just that: a cheap imitation).

Next week I’m going to be very attentive: in the theatre business it is said that after a successful premiere the second night is the most dangerous.

And I’m exhausted, so I must keep my attention sharp and no fall back to old bad habits!

Wish me luck, next week the theme (I know cause this is my second time taking this class) is going to be “time”….. which proved to be a major problem in an illustration but should be a piece of cake in a comic….  meaning beware: here begins the Moria! (LOTR allusion, and if you dont know what LOTR means here another puzzle to occupy you till the next entry in this blog: that laser sword with the laser hilt is stupid!)

See you next week, must no let my guard down!