Please Litter

I just stepped back and took a picture of my floor about five minutes ago. Much to the annoyance of my family and past roommates, I am simply a messy person. I know that not everyone on the planet is that way, but you have to admit that trash seems to be everywhere. That's actually a very important note for an artist to keep in mind. Trash has a way of making a scene believable. I think that's because it's so familiar to us as a symbol that people occupy that space. Wherever people go, we leave our trash behind us--we've been doing it since ancient culture, as any archeologist will tell you! I think that the only time an artist should make a voluntary effort to make a scene look clean is if the environment is supposed to be some sort of sterile environment or something. Otherwise, even justa little litter: rust on metal, paper next to a trash can, gum on a sidewalk--heck, people put their gum on the underside of just about everything. In my case, a person's room might not be covered in trash, but things that just aren't put away. Instead of putting things on shelves and drawers, books, DVDs, clothes, etc. can be spotted onto a room's floor. This applies to all environments, I think: offices, elevators, cars, subways, parks; I'm sure alien cultures share our bad habits; we haven't shaken our litter problem in 5000 years of civilization, what makes you think we'll stop littering in the future?

Under the (Pre-Raphelite) Influence

This painting on tin plates by Burne-Jones, Morris, and Faulkner is technically sequential art. The Pre-Raphelite brotherhood was all about reigniting interest in the older (and in some cases forgotten) romantic stories. One thing that I've noticed about several other artists of this movement--Rossetti, for one--is their use of patterns as backgrounds or design elements. Though not a common practice in today's sequential art, it can be a useful tool to create interest in the gutters (the space between the panels). It can also be an interesting addition to a piece that has some sort of tie to medieval art, which was what the Pre-Raphelites loved to do.

In this detail of my work-in-progress, I decided to give it a shot. While the story is ultimately not one connected to medieval art, it's more of an ode to the Pre-Raphelite movement. The piece also has Celtic roots, so I figured that a Celtic knot might be appropriate. Though, a fair warning to artists that might try to do Celtic knots in their work: it's time consuming and very difficult to wrap your head around!...though I suppose that's the point.

The Down-shot

In cinematography--the art of filming and framing for film--one of the most effective ways to create isolation, or just to establish a whole lot of an environment, is to view the scene from high in the air. Perhaps one of the most famous examples of this is from the classic western film High Noon. I recently saw this movie for the first time (finally) and noted that the famous shot had so much weight because the film built suspense incredibly well.

Joseph Mascelli talks about how to use this idea to its fullest extent in his book The 5 C's of Cinematography: "Very high and very low angles will present the most drastic effects, and should be utilized only when highly dramatic results are required. More subtle angling should be employed as a matter of course on every possible type of shot...Players should be positioned so that they present a three-quarter view to the camera, and travel in diagonal lines, whenever feasible. Furniture and other props should be cheated, if necessary, so that they are turned at an angle to the lens. The background should be filmed at an angle, rather than flat on, to produce diminishing compositional lines." (Mascelli, 45)

A slightly more contemporary example might be from Batman: Mask of the Phantasm. I think my favorite aspect of this is that Bruce (center) is still painfully lonely, even though his friend and butler Alfred is there with him. Alfred, though, fades to the background because of his position in the scene (amidst the rocks and trees), and the giant crack in the rock directs the eye straight to Bruce.

My mimicry of this principle is for a design sketch for a panel in a project I'm working on. My focus was using the contrast created by shadows to keep the attention on the character in the center.

Neckage

A strange detail, but one that can definitely help a drawing. The neck is often not focussed on as important, but in the case of drawing the head of a muscular male, it can be very useful to the artist. Probably the best example of the muscular neck is Mel Gibson when he was in "Braveheart." Two other examples might be Daniel Day Lewis in "The Last of the Mohicans,"and one of the latest Hollywood hotties, Ryan Reynolds. I think Gibson wins the prize for 'best' because he's got the perfect male jawline. So, consider this: if a guy is muscular, but much to screaming girls' chagrin is forced to wear a shirt that isn't molded to his chest, an image that shows him flexing/turning his neck can help indicate that he's got some decent muscles. Think of it this way, if you have a buff neck, chances are, you've been working out everything else.

It's easy to just draw a cylindrical connection from shoulder to head, but even the slightest indication of the complex musculature can really improve an image. Up-shots are also an obvious help: primarily up-turned angles make anything heroic, but for this topic, it will also bring more attention to the neck/jaw area.

The New Blog, and Swinging a Sword

Welcome to my brand-spanking new blog! This artist's blog will be about the creative process that I go through when I'm working on my comics. It won't strictly be a 'sketch blog' because I'll be posting work by artists that I admire and commentating on it aswell. The purpose of it is to show the curious and the creative how I go about the problem-solving process in drawing. I'll focus on three different things:

1) Other Artists: How they do it and me trying to mimic it.

2) Process: Behind the scenes of how I draw something--from reference to finished pieces.

3) Details: Those important, little details that make or break an image, and why it's vital to a piece.

I'll be posting once or twice a week, and the work here will for the most part be exclusive to the site. You can view my artwork at www.tedwoods.daportfolio.com. I'll also be getting a website soon, so look forward to that. As I said, this blog is for the curious and the creative. I've had many people ask me about my process, and they've seemed genuinely interested in the way I go about solving different problems. I also know that other artists can feed off each other's creativity. So check back often, and tell your friends!

For the first real post, I'm going to talk about an image I did of a knight swinging his sword. I'd already drawn a few versions of it before, but I decided to take the opportunity to get some decent reference and try to make this version of the drawing a bit more realistic. Plus, it was also fun to make my roommate feel stupid when he was swinging a sword around in broad daylight. I took a video of him swinging it from roughly the angle I wanted it shot from. The video was because I was drawing a person in a motion, and it's always obvious when someone is posing what they think the motion is and holding still, and actually doing the motion. Even with the video, I needed to make a few tweeks just to make the pose more dynamic and fluid. Wholesale copying from reference is also problematic because the camera flattens a 3-D image, and normal people have a difficult time looking dynamic, even when we try. Of course, the final image was about an inch and a half tall. But I think it's important to get even those small images right, even though in the back of your head you know that no one will really notice, since the finished product will be about half that size.