Professional Development Week

A couple of weeks ago, I took advantage of a break between stories to spend a week trying out different drawing techniques. Using traditional materials, I drew a couple of pages like I used to back in the day, but I soon remembered why I stopped doing that. No matter how much I love drawing in my sketchbook, I can't get that carefree feeling onto a "proper comic" page. I became the opposite of carefree, in fact, the stress after a couple of days of it was extraordinary. And no one was every going to see these pages!

Gritting my teeth and persisting, I hoped to pass through a sort of "wall" and to begin to express genius onto paper but I got worse as I went on. There's a gulf of comfort between my old work materials (I worked with pen and paper from 1998-2000 and 2006-2008) and the digital tools I've used for the last 13 years that I don't think can be bridged without a commensurate period of practice. I will not be selling my "originals" any time soon.

Here's the first one. Inking a page on the Cintiq, I usually achieve a "flow" state, it's pleasant, I see possibilities and fixes as I go, like a third hand helping me out. Doing this felt like I was a hand short. Twice I felt the flow kick in - for about ten seconds, before dropping out again. 

The results were rough but passable on the first page, but the second... I turned off the lightbox and nearly screamed. It looked like I'd asked someone off the street to ink my pencils for me. I had a headache. I stopped that nonsense. 

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That week, I also had a go at expanding the way I draw my Patreon comics onto full-size pages. I found some old and fairly simple pages to try out this system on. A system which features no pencilling - I just correct as I go and hope for the best.

This is the first one I drew...

And this one was the second. Here I started to do things I'd do on my regular Steeple pages, looking for more difficult top-down angles, but here not having any pencils to lean on, which lead me into the trap of making something recognisably worse rather than different, so I didn't colour it in. I could see where I was going wrong.

This is a technique that leans on muscle memory and simplicity, I can't "build" everything in my head the way I want to to make dynamic pages because I can't really picture anything in my mind's eye. A thumbnail sketch on paper would have helped for this second one, because the further I got from the pages I was redrawing, the more lost I became.

The place this style works best for me is a strip, where figures rather than backgrounds drive the layout. I'm not sure I can do a "fast" comic page. I'm not Kim Jung Gi, obviously, and I never will be. But I want to keep looking for different ways to draw comics - I greatly enjoy loose, fast artists like Ken Niimura and Joann Sfar - just so I don't get sick of myself. 

Half the battle is against my own expectations. The reason I stopped drawing with pen and paper and switched to digital in 2008 was because I couldn't ink comics to the standard I wanted. I didn't have the patience to get the sort of lines I wanted to see.

My favourite thing I did during Professional Development Week was this improvised warm-up.

I'm always a bit disappointed that I can't chip away at the walls of my brain and discover an entirely new artistic self who has somehow eluded me, like a new wing of your house that the previous owners had bricked up. But I always learn something. I don't think practice and self-improvement are meant to be easy, or even pleasant. And there follows a perverse comfort to returning to my usual way of doing things. After a week of frequent frustration, it feels like slipping on comfortable old shoes. So there's always that to look forward to.