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Blog reader Jen Zeller commented about the recent post "Art by Committee":

It would be quite awesome if you could offer one of these as a weekly inspiration to us sketch-happy blog followers. I get the feeling many of us would love to give back a bit in this job, but on the other hand, you do spend a lot of valuable time with this blog already, and we don't want to go getting greedy. It's a great idea, makes me remember my school days in biology, where I was constantly poking fun with sketches at something the teacher or our text books said.

I've painted a lot of paperback covers. For each job I get a big thick manuscript. I use the old manuscripts for scratch paper. Once it a while I’ll turn a sheet of paper over to see what’s written on it. Sentences like this jump out at me:

“…Flames from the creature licked at his back. Something crackled around his head, and he realized his hair was on fire…”

For an illustrator like me, a line like that is hard to pass up. So I’ve snipped out a few of the best excerpts and stuck them out of context into the pages of a big blank sketchbook.


I call the book ART BY COMMITTEE. I bring it to coffee shops when I’m hanging out with other artists. The other artist might be my wife or it might be a couple of notable comic artists, painters, or animators. I can’t reveal their identities—in fact I can’t remember exactly who drew what. And don’t ask me what novel the excerpt came from. I have no clue.


While waiting for the scrambled eggs, we take turns illustrating the scraps of stories. Here’s a sample page. Click to enlarge. If you like this sort of thing, there’s more where it came from.

We feel a deep affinity for animals. This cartoon by the Australian artist Norman Lindsay, called "Near Relations," shows people who look like chickens—or are those chickens who look like people?


Yesterday we explored a few of the problems we run into with when we try to design animals so that they express human emotions and perform human actions. We’ve seen the challenges presented by birds, cows, donkeys, and even rodents with their beady eyes.

Here’s an experiment from my sketchbook. I did this drawing while listening to my son and his friends play traditional music. While the kids played fiddle, accordion, and tambourine, some dogs and cats circulated around the room.

Instead of drawing the musicians as they appeared, I tried to imagine the dogs and cats (and a squirrel I saw outside) as if they were scaled up and holding the instruments.

As you can see, I drew the dog’s feet “digitigrade” rather than “plantigrade,” meaning I lifted the heels off the ground. But I forgot to redesign the slippers. The hands are just paws. They’re OK for the sketch, but they wouldn’t work if you had to animate the characters. And I was a bit ambivalent about the costumes. I put the dog in socks and a T-shirt, but left the costumes off the rest.


In the last installment tomorrow, I’ll share some examples of an alternative to anthropomorphism, which you might call “animal-morphism.” (Above, Rien Poortvliet)

Have you ever watched a parrot scratch himself with a feather? Here’s a YouTube video:



Owner Cheryl Rampton didn't train Poncho to do this. He figured out how to hold the feather in his foot and reach back to scratch his neck. If the grip on the feather needs adjustment, he uses his beak to hold it for a second. The wings stay tucked.

A parrot really has three “hands”: his beak and his two feet. With those he’s got nearly as much dexterity as we humans do.


When we want to design a character based on a bird, we naturally want to make their wings into hands. This makes sense from the standpoint of comparative anatomy, but it goes completely against their bird nature. And it’s impractical. A bird can gesture with his primary wingtip feathers, but he can’t shake hands, make a fist, or pick up an object with them.



Putting animal heads onto humanoid bodies leads to other absurdities. Did you every wonder why you never see Elsie the Cow below the shoulders? Would she have (ahem) breasts or udders? Either way would be pretty weird.

For the rest of the week through Saturday we’ll look at how character designers have developed clever ways to infuse animals with human personalities.

Last week Jeanette and I visited the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts to see the exhibition called “Lit Graphic: The World of the Graphic Novel,” which is on view through May 26.

Co-curators Stephanie Plunkett and Martin Mahoney told us that Tom Wolfe invented the term “Lit Graphic” to describe the art form of the contemporary novel-length comic book, which has unfortunately been overlooked by most art museums.

Will Eisner, whose work on the groundbreaking Contract with God is well represented in the show, coined the more familiar term “graphic novel.” Another pioneer was Lynd Ward, who told wordless stories with woodcuts in the 1920s and 1930s. Forty-nine of those delicate images, each separately framed, festoon one wall.

Let me say a word about what is not in the exhibition. There are no French or Japanese comics, no daily or Sunday comic strips, and no Marvel or DC superhero comics. Although most of the works deal with serious, real-world themes, the curators stopped short of exhibiting work that is extremely violent or risqué. But that still leaves a diverse and vital field of talent.

In the room tracing the history of the graphic novels, there are some representative examples by Robert Crumb (including a teenage sketchbook) , but the other two rooms place the emphasis on the contemporary American scene.

As Mark Wheatley observes, graphic novels are not a genre, but "a language--and it's a visual language." Altogether, there are 146 works by 24 artists, including pages by Peter Kuper, Lauren Weinstein, Harvey Kurtzman, Marc Hempel, Dave Sim, Terry Moore and many others.

You can get an online preview of the work and the personalities by viewing the half-dozen mini-documentaries shot on location by producer Jeremy Clowe and recently posted on YouTube:
Part 1: Peter Kuper
Part 2: Marc Hempel
Part 3: Brian Fies
Part 4: Continued

The Rockwell Museum deserves a lot of credit for their pioneering spirit in championing American narrative art in all its forms. In conjunction with the Lit Graphic show, the museum is hosting a student graphic novel contest, inviting high schoolers from the northeastern US to submit their creations. Winners will be honored in a mini-exhibition at the museum. More information: Link.

Norman Rockwell himself explored personal, edgy themes like war and racism in his later career, and he was always supportive of young talent and new graphic ideas. I feel very sure that he would have been pleased to see the huge turnout of young people who attended the opening.

For museums interested in hosting one of the Rockwell Museum's traveling exhibitions (including Dinotopia), Link
Lit Graphic press release: Link
Reading list from TIME: Link

Comic artists naturally think in two tonal values, black and white. Masters like Roy Crane, Milton Caniff and Hal Foster (below) told epic stories with nothing else. This simplicity of means automatically lends power to their images.
But painters have to work at creating contrast. If we don’t, our paintings get the “middle-value-mumbles,” the tendency to paint everything in the middle of the tonal range.

Here’s a good exercise to cure yourself of the middle value mumbles. Do a sketch where everything in the light is rendered in white and everything in shadow is stated in black.


I’ll show you the idea executed in several different media. The medium or technique doesn’t matter; the idea does. In this picture I used a brushpen with no pencil layin. The faces are people in an audience listening to Irish music. They were lit by a single light bulb overhead.

For this to work, you need to have a subject lit by one light source, or by the sun. Try to ignore the actual local color. Push everything to dramatic extremes. The effect will resemble and old photo or a painting that has been photocopied a million times. Try not to use any lines. Define everything with shapes. For the picture below of the library, that meant leaving off the vertical lines on the right of the columns and the horizontal lines defining the stairs.

I laid in the drawing in pencil, and used a fine Micron pen and a marker for the shadows. I drew it in daytime from across the street. I had a hard time deciding whether to make the sky white or black.


If you evaluate the library image in “Image/Adjust Levels” in Photoshop, the histogram looks like a wide flat valley (no middle tones) with tall peaks in the black and the white.


Here's the idea carried out in oil at a sketch group. I used pure titanium white and ivory black, each with its own brush, working over a dark gray ground.

It takes supreme determination to avoid the temptation to blend the colors into greys. Don’t give in! Let edges disappear! The viewer of your picture will not mind seeking out or imagining the edges that you have to leave out.

For more on a related subject, visit the earlier posts on shapewelding and high contrast shapewelding.