Indie Kid!

Evening!

Today I had a few hours to spare, so for the first time in about three forevers, I plugged my Wacom tablet in and started doodling. This is the end result, a nice little pic of a bloke wearing a jacket and skinny jeans. I feel horribly generic-thirteen-year-old-girl-with-a-deviantart-account because of what I ended up drawing, but I can’t be held responsible – I wasn’t feeling particularly inspired.

I haven’t really drawn anything lately – I used to practice for a few hours every day for ten years before music became such a pressing issue. There are a lot of people out there (David Heatley and James Kochalka to name but two) who treat music and comics as equal endeavors, and are as good at one as the other. Comics was always my first love, but music just came to bloom before comics did. Perhaps I should start drawing again. It seems a waste to stop doing something after I’ve spent so long practicing it and learning how to do it.

I dunno.

Three is the number of times I’ve attempted to start a proper full length comic book, and I’ve never really got past the first twelve pages. There’s a lot of planning involved that gets me down. Storytelling is everything.

There are a lot of technically brilliant artists out there who treat it as a hobby, as I do, but then there are a lot less technically able people who’ve released a lot of books and are very well respected. It’s finding that combination between what you do and how you do it that’s partly the key to the whole thing, but also a strong sense of being able to breathe life into what you draw. There are a lot of beautiful illustrations of people that are so close to lifelike but look almost dead (fan art is a brilliant example of this for some reason) to the point that it’s creepy. I believe the term for this is ‘Uncanny Valley’. Look it up. On the other hand, there are people (like the aforementioned Kochalka) who create these amazingly animated characters out of a few flicks of a brush. It’s a sort of magic that only comes with years and years of practice and skill.

This blog post is all over the place and not at all coherent, and I apologise for this. I’ll try to form my ideas about drawing – and in particular the world of sequential art – into another later blog post. I might do a Just Imagine later as well. Look out!

Some artists and works I strongly recommend you check out:

Daniel Clowes, in particular Ghost World

Charles Burns, in particular Black Hole, which is beautifully rendered and which I just finished reading

Chris Ware, in particular Jimmy Corrigan (which I gave PJ for Christmas – ask him how good it is)

Julie Doucet, who has this really intense, full style that always seems messy to the point of chaos, but isn’t

Seth, who is a lot more nuanced and grownup than his monosyllabic moniker would suggest.