Statistics for the week of Sunday, April 29th to Saturday May 5th:
Average waking time: 6:25am
Average getting-up time: 7:45am
Number of cups of coffee consumed: 7
Number of alcoholic beverages consumed: 5
Number of times I left the apartment: 7
Number of hours spent drawing: 48.5
Amount of chocolate consumed: yes
Average number of daily emails sent: 12.5
Average bed time: 11:30pm
Most unprofessional phrase used in a professional email: “I am a stressed muffin.”
The manuscript is in sections all over my studio, covered in notes and brightly colored page markers. A mug of lukewarm coffee is to my right, a silent inkjet printer is to my left, and directly in front of me is my computer, wacom tablet plugged in and ready. I’ve been sitting digitally drawing for days, and haven’t looked back at a single thing I’ve drawn. What am I doing? The Roughs!
The physical illustration process for almost any book begins with the “roughs,” an initial set of rough sketches that go along with the text. For myself I like to get through this stage as fast as I humanly can, because a blank piece of paper (or a blank screen) is one of my biggest fears, a world where every mark can become an instant, ugly scar. Without a break-neck pace I’ll endlessly revise and revisit drawings, resulting in zero progress and crushing self-doubt. It almost doesn’t matter what I draw or how bad it is in the first pass; the point is to get something completely done so that I have a place from which to start editing. In my first pass at the 36 to 40 rough scenes of interior art, how many times did I draw three West children pointing at maps? At least three (yuck!) but from there each scene could only improve. I’m happy to say that by now all of the “map pointing” has hit the cutting room floor.
One of the things that keeps me moving during the Roughs is an even more terrifying shape than a blank white rectangle: a black diagonal line keeping time on The Chart:
This metronome for progress is one of the most useful illustration tools I own. Back in February, when I learned that I would be illustrating Sarah Stewart Taylor’s THE EXPEDITIONERS, I also learned that I’ve only have 12-14 weeks to do the book from start to finish. The drawing experience would be a marathon, with some sprinting and high-jumping thrown in for good measure, and I needed a gun to get me sprinting from the start. The Chart was directly inspired by the ever-talented Alec Longstreth (Basewood), a former teacher from The Center for Cartoon Studies, who uses this tool to track progress on his own work. With an aggressive goal of reaching 40 interior drawings (vertical axis) in the time span of 8 days (horizontal axis), there was absolutely no time to be afraid of the blank page. The rest of my to-do list may have failed, but this angry line kept me on track at a pace of five rough digital drawings a day.
Of course, not everything drawn in the Roughs stage is bad, and sometimes I even hit on something terrific. A stellar composition! A character design that rings true in future drafts! Or even a concept can be relocated to work better earlier or later in the manuscript. The Roughs give me a foundation on which to build the book, and each successive pass gives the structure more definition.
In THE EXPEDITIONERS, one of my favorite drawing moments is when the eldest brother, Zander, discovers a new species of slug. Here’s the full sequence of drawings, from concept sketches to digital rough (above) to the final rough draft before it goes to final art. This reflects about four weeks of worth of change. Note that after the digital rough draft, I abandoned the idea of having the characters posing with the slug in favor of showing the slug alone, as if from the character’s point of view. The result is, I feel, a much stronger and more interesting compositon:
[DIGITAL ROUGH GOES HERE]
I’d like to thank Art Nouveau, the Viennese Secessionists, Japanese postcards, and everyone who’s ever posted photos of cool slugs. More roughs and sketches from other scenes coming soon!
In light of last week’s blog post, I thought I should showcase some of the coolest slugs I found while doing visual research for THE EXPEDITIONERS (yay slugs!) There seem to be an almost infinite variety of shapes, sizes, and colors among this enormous group, and I am drawn the the delicate shape of their antennae, the outline of their veins, their flexible bodies.
Slugs are categorized as gastropod molluscs, closely related to snails and distant cousins to squids and octopi. The phylum of mollusc is the largest marine phylum, making up 23% of all of the ocean’s critters, and the most bizarre body plans belong to the slugs of the sea.
All slugs are hermaphroditic, which means that they are both male and female, and land slugs breath through a pneumostome, a single respiratory hole on the (almost always) right hand side of their head. I wish I’d grown up with slugs like these around; the brown slugs of the Silicon Valley suburbs just aren’t quite as cool!
Statistics for the week of Sunday, May 6th to Saturday May 12th:
Average waking time: 6:40am
Average getting-up time: 8:10am
Number of cups of coffee consumed: 12
Number of alcoholic beverages consumed: 6
Number of times I left the apartment: 5
Number of hours spent drawing: 51.75
Amount of Motrin IB taken: 600mg
Average number of daily emails sent: 8.25
Average bed time: 11:45pm
iTunes song played the most number of times in a row: Beast of Burden by the Rolling Stones
Statistics for the week of Sunday, May 13th to Saturday May 19th:
Average waking time: 7:05am
Average getting-up time: 8:18am
Number of cups of coffee consumed: 12
Number of alcoholic beverages consumed: 9
Number of times I left the apartment: 4
Number of hours spent drawing: 48
Number of New York City landmarks visited with out-of-town family: 9
Average number of daily emails sent: 3.4
Average bed time: 11:45pm
Audiobooks completed: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, and Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá
The very first project I assigned my freshman 2D design class at the Art Institute of Boston was a “Bird Attack” in cut-out black paper against a white background, and I must say that they weren’t terribly thrilled with the idea. I could clearly see them thinking “aren’t we in college? what’s with the kindergarten assignment?” But the critique the following week built a foundation for all subsequent discussions. What does a horizontal line do? What does a vertical line symbolize? Which arrangements will create the most tension, depth, and speed? In other words… how can we use seemingly simple shapes to compose our content before we ever start to draw? In the projects that followed I was delighted to see that their ideas took leaps and bounds forward as they started to think about the picture plane in a whole new way. (For a fabulous introduction to this, be sure to pick up Molly Bang’s Picture This.)
Which, oddly enough, directly relates to THE EXPEDITIONERS, because while reading the manuscript I found that Sarah Stewart Taylor had given me just that assignment: to draw giant vultures attacking the four main characters as they travel downstream on a river. If only I’d made the assignment that much more complicated for my students!
I poked through the files of my brain trying to remember our in-class discussions. Diagonals create tension. Sharp shapes are perceived as threatening. I can use the oars and wings to tilt the movement of the composition. I went through countless versions of this drawing, trying not to completely disappoint myself after having forced my students to attempt the same problem. I also imposed upon my husband at least twice to pose as a terrified teenager. It turns out he’s quite good at imagining fictitious birds attacking him while sitting on a storage bench in a 10th floor New York apartment.
I finally came up with a solution I liked to use as the foundation for the final line art for the drawing. As for drawing the actual attacking birds, the turkey vulture proved to be the most helpful reference. Vultures are mostly scavenging birds, and turkey vultures have evolved bald heads and huge, unseparated nostrils as adaptions to stay clean and stay breathing while diving head first into the bloated bellies of dead animals. Turkey vultures also have a six foot wingspan (!!), not quite as large as these birds but certainly a good place to start. I’m quite relieved that facing-off with a vulture is not part of my foreseeable future!
Statistics for the week of Sunday, May 20th to Saturday May 26th:
Average waking time: 6:45am
Average getting-up time: 8:00am
Number of cups of coffee consumed: 10
Number of alcoholic beverages consumed: 6
Number of times I left the apartment: 3
Number of hours spent drawing: 60
Number of moving boxes packed: 0
Average number of daily emails sent: 7.3
Average bed time: midnight
Audiobooks completed: A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Authur Conan Doyle.
Sorry folks, no real blog post this week: Tim and I are officially moving to NYC! Yes, yes, we’ve been here for a while, but we finally found a place of our own on the upper east side. Whoot! Today I’m rather frantic trying to find and pack boxes, including not a few wine boxes from liquor stores, so we’re sure to look like alcoholics to our new neighbors. I’m also noticing that some boxes seem to follow us from move to move: our former printer’s box, for example, has lived with us in four states, and once upon a time twelve years ago my now-thumb-tack-box housed a wristwatch. That dingy little tin has literally seen every step of my career since life drawing day one of freshman year at RISD!
So far, the most eclectic box of stuff packed contains: 2 candles, a Christmas tree holder, a hair dryer with diffuser, an umbrella, a metal wire basket, hand sanitizer, spray fixative, gorilla glue, a vinyl repair kit, and a set of wind-up penguin salt and pepper shakers. Make of that what you will!
