Author: hamishmacdonald

I am unduly excited about receiving a package in the mail today.

About a week ago, it struck me that trying to manipulate figures in 3D software — even those provided in my beloved Clip Studio Paint — is just too tedious. And as visual references, their proportions are always wrong and they’re too stiff-looking.

So I searched around for a portable artist’s model — but not those awful wooden things, which don’t look like anything and are horrible to pose.

Enter Modibots: Wee action figures created by a brilliant member of the 3D-printing community.

Now, if I were a parent, I’d be over the moon about being able to give my kids something to play with that’s blank, that doesn’t come with a prescripted story to confine their imagination.

As it is, the pictures made these little figures — for all their blankness — feel full of motion, character, and charm.

I placed my order, and today got a wee kit full of assemble-it-yourself parts. Just playing with them for a few minutes yielded all kinds of lively poses. These feel like the characters I draw, so I think this is going to be a huge help. I’ve finally found an anatomy reference that works for me.

Totally not toys.

As they arrived.

Removing the pieces from the frame.

Assembled!

Made a friend.

These are water-pistols. I don’t like guns, but figured these might be a handy reference at some point.

Man down!

Diver & gladiator

“My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die!

After getting that kick in my self-esteem on Friday, I asked myself “WWDD?” (y’know, Dan, my boss and mentor), and decided to lower the bar and start making every bit of work I could think of — just for fun, and from half-formed notions rather than waiting for the perfect, fully formed idea to emerge from my forehead like Athena.

So I made a little animated thing and rearranged my Comics page to make room for lots more like that — it’s behind the little fox doodle.

Sure feels a lot better than looking at what others are doing and getting down about it!

I spent the afternoon enjoying the hospitality of two local cartoonists, Troy Little and Brenda Hickey.

As well as being lovely people (whose studio is like The Best Toy and Comic Shop Ever), they are extremely talented — like as good as it gets good. The smooth beauty of the lines they draw, and the dense, lush, giant pages of excellently composed art they produce are just astounding.

The Sufis say (and I constantly remind myself), “Comparison is the thief of joy.” I’m reminding myself again, because next to them I feel, professionally, like a child.

But then, as James Kochalka said, “Craft is the enemy“: Cartooning is not about how good your line quality or draughtsmanship is, but about what you convey with your lines. Quentin Blake is a great example of someone whose lines are positively ugly, but whose work is irresistibly charming.

Don’t get me wrong: Brenda and Troy also happen to do compelling things with their beautiful lines, so it’s clearly not an either/or proposition.

Okay, I’m officially jealous.

So what can I do with this? Well, keep getting better, for one. And, in the meantime, do what Kochalka says: “What every creator should do, must do, is use the skills they have right now.”

(But, as Lynda Barry said somewhere, don’t just keep drawing cartoons about how stuck you are. So, yeah, it’s time to stop that.)

In related news…

Last night I attended the Charlottetown Comics Club, and this time I stayed!

The folks were really welcoming, fun, and up to all sorts of creative stuff.

So between these two outings, I seem to have found a great community and a huge source of inspiration.

I finally got back to my sketchbook.

One of our clients at work has a son who wants to be a cartoonist, so I just wrote a little “inside peek” at how I do my work for Strategic Coach. I figured I should share that here, too.

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When I was a kid, I was totally obsessed with coming up with my own characters (“copying” was a swear-word to me). Unfortunately, though, I stopped there, just drawing each character standing still, over and over.

Working with Dan has been a brilliant challenge for me. He’ll say, “I picture dozens of entrepreneurs jumping from one platform to another, all of them looking and doing something different.” Um… okay! As a result of taking on these challenges, I’ve learned a ton, and my skills have just exploded over these past few years.

In other words, I’m finally drawing characters in comic strip panels full of action.

The biggest tip I could give about drawing goes back to all those books on cartooning I read as a kid — although at the time I found their advice constantly frustrating — as is summed up perfectly in this internet meme:

But I’ve finally caught onto this principle, called “under-drawing”, and it’s made a huge difference in my abilities.

Putting pencil to paper and producing a finished drawing is like walking out of the shower, onto a stage, and performing an opera. Sure, there’s probably someone who can do it, but most of us mortals need to rehearse.

In comics, the equivalent to that rehearsal is “under-drawing”: using a light “non-photo blue” pencil to rough out the shapes that make up your character and scene, then going in with your pencil or ink to do the final lines — the “performance”.

The advantage is that it makes everything hold together — whereas if you just start out somewhere in the middle and go from there, you get some pretty weird anatomy happening, find your words all squooshed into a corner, or you make a mistake you can’t undo. (Okay, I do my final Coach work in software, so, yes, I can undo it. But I can’t Control-Z on paper. I do often find myself trying to “pinch-to-zoom” on paper as well.)

So this is how I work:

1) I’ve made cereal box cut-outs for all my different sizes of comic panels. So I start by tracing out my panel on paper.

2) Inside the panel, I rough out the geometric shapes that make up my characters and the scene. Then I go over the lines in pencil. (You can see my blue under-drawing here. I had trouble getting the hands and the book right!)

3) I scan this and bring it into the program where I do all my cartooning work, Clip Studio Paint. It’s a complicated monster of a thing, translated from Japanese, but it is incredible. It does absolutely everything — like Photoshop on steroids, just for cartoonists. Unlike Photoshop, though, which is $50 a month forever, Clip Studio Paint is $50… once. I don’t get how it can be so cheap, but I’m grateful to the people who make this miracle of a thing.

I was spinning my wheels trying to understand it until I found some great YouTube videos that helped me get started, and I’ve been learning something new just about every day since.

4) In Clip Studio Paint, I can turn my real-world grey pencils into blue lines again — like digital under-drawing.

5) I do my final “inks” on the computer. Clip Studio Paint has layers, and I use those a lot. It’s so much easier than drawing permanently, destructively on top of your original. So I create a new layer and ink on it.

6) With my inks in place, I turn off the blue layer, create another layer underneath my inks, and colour in the character. (In the comics profession, this is called “flatting” — probably because “colouring-in” doesn’t sound like a job somebody would get paid for.) Some of the brushes make hard lines, whereas others are soft, like watercolour brushes — I like to use those for shadows. (You can see those softer brush-strokes on his cheeks, hand, arms, and hair.)

7) Then I put in a background on another layer.

8) Now it’s time for all the decoration and special effects, which I putter around with a lot — but, since they’re on their own layers, they don’t damage my foreground character at all.

And that’s how I make my cartoons for Strategic Coach!

I hope that’s helpful.

They’ve released a (meandering, kinda pointless) scene from Alien: Covenant. But there’s an incidentally gay couple in it – just two blokes, not spaceship interior decorators. Weird that this still feels like a breakthrough.

EDIT: One of the commenters on that page made a good point: This is supposed to be a colonizing spaceship. So, yeah, sending a gay couple to help populate a world doesn’t make sense. Maybe they have some sort of essential skills… like decorating. Oh, God.

I made a wee friend the other day. He was freezing to death on the path in front of our house. I went inside to get some food for him, and, on returning, found him on his side, seemingly perished.

So I took him inside, where we warmed him up, made him a wee nest in a big plastic tub, and fed him. He made a full recovery!

…Then escaped during the night and is now somewhere in our house.

Oops.

Cribbed from an e-mail to a friend…

My clicky-finger was hovering over the ‘Deactivate’ button on Facebook just a few days ago.

I hesitate to share anything there because I don’t want to deal with the volume or possible negativity of others’ reactions. Yet, as a creative person who’s enough of a wank to need applause, I enjoy having someplace to share things where I know people will see them. (Twitter used to be that, but I have a weird feeling that Twitter is dying.)

If I thought anyone would ever see my blog, I’d just stick to posting there, because that’s my space, and I have some creative control there. I don’t particularly want to advance Facebook’s thing. (Especially when I’m on my phone and it recommends horrible pages by horrible Americans saying horrible things.)

I wish I could just ignore Facebook, but somehow it has a gravitational pull, especially in those empty moments when I’m spent. But when I do pull myself away and read or even just look up, life feels better.

This is a long podcast interview between cartoonist Chris Schweizer and educator Jerzy Drozd, discussing non-violence in comics — but it really extends into every story in our culture, and the way violence is so often presented as the de facto solution to every conflict (e.g. Marty McFly is a chicken unless he punches Biff in the face, and his doing so instantly resolves the situation).

This is an idea that keeps coming back to me lately: “What is peace?” How can we be peaceful, especially when faced with an opposing force hell-bent on violence, or unwilling to engage with the level of thought and empathy that makes peace possible?

As John Lennon said:

When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system’s game. The establishment will irritate you – pull your beard, flick your face – to make you fight! Because once they’ve got you violent, then they know how to handle you. The only thing they don’t know how to handle is non-violence and humor.

I’m grateful that my work gives me the time and space to listen to long-form discussions like this in the background!

Chris Schweizer and Jerzy Drozd on non-violence