Making the Connections

Cartoonist Kayfabe covered some Simon Bisley Dredd today, and at the end they busted out an old Punisher War Journal with art by Mark Texeira. They talked about the connection between them, that I had never realized before—basically they said Tex undoubtedly had a strong influence from the Biz.* It was a forehead slap moment. Of COURSE he does!! As does Bill Sienkiewicz (or was he already around in the 80's when I think Bisley got his start? Not sure).

This all fits a few more pieces of the puzzle together for me. Bisley got his main inspiration that I'm aware of from Frazetta and Corben, and then he exterted a powerful influence on the next generation of artists working on the periphery of mainstream comic art. I say periphery because none of them really did the standard Marvel or DC style stuff, they were outliers like Frank Miller. 

And they all have something in common, something that I want to develop myself. Well, not Miller really, but the rest of the ones I mentioned—

A solid understanding of proportioning, anatomy and figure drawing from imagination. 

It's clear to me they all practiced it enough that the knowledge became ingrained, absorbed into the unconscious. In fact deeper than that—I've heard it said that the things you practice the most get written on the spinal cord. No thinking required, it's instant access.

You get this effect if you drill repeatedly for years on the same moves, like practicing your scales on a guitar or a piano, drilling in martial arts, or drawing heads and torsos and arms and legs from every angle in every position. Memorizing the anatomy until you know the skeletal structure and the muscle structure—how everything meshes together and works, the forms of every part, and how things change when tthey move.

You have to draw it enough so you can do it in your sleep, or almost literally with your eyes closed. I'll never hit that level. I'd need to have been drawing comic books for the last decade at least, and I've done nothing of the sort. But I can at least embed the knowledge in my unconscious. Some of it's already there, though I haven't drawn much at all in a couple of years. Enough I hope to keep the new knowledge from dissipating. And when I get back to it I should be able to call it all up and get back in practice. Do a bunch more comic-style drawings to really memorize the anatomy as basic bone and muscle forms in the abstract. And draw from a lot of photos, do a bunch more master copies of paintings from artists I admire. All of it contributes to the necessary knowledge-base. Having learned the forms of the body and of the muscles and the facial features etc, I now need to draw from pictures and work that understanding, visualize it all three-dimenstionally, so I can rotate it or change the pose or the lighting if I want to. 

This is the essence of the kind of art I most want to make, so I can work entirely from the imagination or from reference if I want to, and make any changes I desire. Not be nailed down to copying exactly what I see in a reference image, even if I don't understand parts of it.

What I learned from the Great Masters series by Robery Beverley Hale is that this is how the artists of the Renaissance and the next couple of centuries did it. Look at a model or a picture, analyze what you see. If some parts are unclear you can work it out because you know all the forms of the body—you can fill in missing information from your mental storehouse. 

And when you can do all of this, that's when you're ready to start caricaturing or distorting in 3 dimensions, with a full understanding of all those structures and forms that comprise the body. Without that kind of comprehensive knowledge you can only distort or caricature 2-dimensionally—flat. Or maybe you can do it 3-dimensionally but only with basic body forms. No sense of the bones under the flesh, and the muscles that give shape to the flesh. 

*Influence is not quite the right word. He didn't say there was any influence necessarily, but that they draw very similarly, or are 'close on the Scott McCloud triangle' (not entirely sure what that is, but I can fathom the basic gist of it). But hell yeah, a lot of similarity, though I'd say Tex has a much narrower range of caricature forms he draws from, while Bisley's is vast. Those steroid-freak Texeira muscle-heads look like sides of beef! 

I decided to look into the Scott McCloud Triangle. Yeah, that makes sense. A nice way to connect up different kinds of art, at various levels of abstraction/realism.