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Chapter Two Pencils Galore, Saunders Again, and More!
🕑 Added 2021-12-10 22:57:15 +0000 UTCThis week: I still have George Saunders on the brain, revisiting the Scene-Sequel approach, a TV recommendation, and it turns out I was right??? about how basic it is to light a character in a scene???
But first! FIRST! Some drawings in progress.
As always, absolutely spoilers galore here, just spoilers splattered all across your screen. Drenched in spoilers. (NOTE: for the most part, personally? Me? I do not believe in spoilers the way the word gets thrown around these days—usually to mean “anything I haven’t already seen,” as I guess I have used it above. I do think “Luke I am your father” and “Bruce Willis was dead the whole time” are true spoilers, but those are rare. But hey: everyone is different. You do you.)
EDIT: these images looked good before I uploaded them, but I think Patreon's subsequent re-compression really crushes the life out of them. I apologize; it's a drawback to my choice to use blue pencil.
^ DD is mad at her mom. Tony pats self on back for use of balusters as jail-bar imagery.
^ Remember that half-seen sparkling object that DD's dad showed the captain in Chapter One? DD finds it.
^ I feel bad for DD's mom. But not too bad.
^ Taking an opportunity to return to the decorative wallpaper motif, as it was thematically appropriate.
^ A bird!
^ I mentioned early on that I wanted to reference some of my father's photography wherever I could, something-something themes of family, something-something. The panel on the left is exactly that.
^ I like this standing-on-the-bed standoff. It's very childish, but also: there's an ornate antique dagger involved.
^ Took a thematically-appropriate opportunity to work in an Art History 101 reference. It might be hard to see, and some of it is a bit oblique, but the left part of the composition should give it away, IMO.
^ One of my favourite panels from my new favourite sequence. When George Saunders talks about elements emerging from the writing to surprise you, the little Midshipman is one of those for me.
^ A church interior. For this, I had to remind myself, "you just wrote a whole blog post about making peace with complicated drawings. Live up to what you said." And overall, I'm pleased with not only the big complicated panel on the left, but the page composition as a whole.
^ The stack that I am holding is Chapter Two, so far.
Hoo boy.
SINKING IN QUICKSAUNDERS.
Continuing from last week, I am still reading George Saunders’ A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. It is still enjoyable food for thought, including “Afterthought #3,” which I think we can interpret as an attack on too much rigid plotting or planning. He uses a metaphor about taking conversational index cards to a first date.
“Those index cards are the conversational equivalent of a plan. A plan is nice. With a plan, we get to stop thinking. We can just execute. But a conversation doesn’t work that way, and neither does a work of art. Having an intention and then executing it does not make good art. Artists know this.”
There’s a repetitive, hammering quality to the way he describes this idea. Since we have established that respecting our readerly time is one of his core values, we can interpret this repetition as passion, insistence. He really wants us to get this.
“If we set out to do a thing, and then we (merely) do it, everyone is bummed out. (That’s not a work of art, that’s a lecture, a data dump.) When we start reading a story, we do so with a built-in expectation that it will surprise us by how far it manages to travel from its humble beginnings; that it will outgrow its early understanding of itself…
“So, why the index cards, on that date? In a word: underconfidence. We prepare those cards and bring them along and keep awkwardly consulting them when we should be looking deeply into our date’s eyes because we don’t believe that, devoid of a plan, we have enough to offer.
“Our whole artistic journey might be understood as the process of convincing ourselves that we do, in fact, have enough, figuring out what that is, then refining it.”
I’m not crying, shut up; you’re crying.
As an aside, I respect an author who uses the term "bummed out."
The section continues for a few more pages, ending in an ambiguous but, I do believe, truthy fashion. He returns to one of the themes he touched on before: writerly intuition. Using it, improving it, and trusting it. Of course, this is all well and good, George, but some of us are drawing pictures over here. It's not as simple as just shuffling a few words around when it’s time to revise.
To me, Saunders sounds strongly anti-structure here. I generally agree with him. Or rather, my best self agrees with him. The part of me that does not want to re-draw comic pages does not. It thinks we need to know where we’re going and what we’ll need to get there. I think it is bad to start with plot lines and index cards and three-act armatures and Hero’s Journey archetypes as ways to allay writerly fear and lack of confidence. But I also think we’re all well within our rights to use whatever tools (methods/approaches) we have at our disposal, if they help us get closer to our goal. For Saunders, that is “truth.” For me, that is also “truth,” and additionally: jokes and sword fights.
SAUNDING OFF THE ROUGH EDGEORGES.
I am approaching the end of drawing Chapter Two. Two more scenes left. Reviewing them, I felt like something was lacking. The scenes did not yet feel “undeniable,” to use Saunderswords; I was not pleased, to use Saundersmetrics.
So I revisited my old friend The Scene-Sequel Approach, which I originally wrote about it at length, way back in this post.
These particular scenes fit into the “Sequel” category, so I squeezed them through the hand-cranked pasta maker of the Sequel prompts. I Reviewed the situation. Our POV character has her emotions. She anticipates what might come next and what choices she might make. She makes her choice. I made a few notes to myself and changed a few lines—I think originally, the sequence didn't do enough anticipation, or it didn't do it clearly enough. I’ll have to re-thumbnail a few pages. And I think they will be better for it.
Overall, I’m feeling very good about where I’m at with my process. I am being surprised by my characters and the turns the story is taking for me. Currently, two of my favourite scenes in this chapter were unplanned-for. I think my now-good-friend George Saunders would be pleased to know that.
But I also feel like I know when to use a tool like Scene-Sequel to help me resolve problems with my own thinking, and I can use it to get the writing closer to where I want it, as opposed to letting it steer me in the wrong direction.
I feel like I "have enough," and I feel like I'm getting to know what it is better every day, as I keep refining. The real challenge is having the will to revisit and revise previous work.
A RECOMMENDATION.
I am watching Season Two of one of my favourite TV series, THE GREAT. It’s the occasionally-true story of Catherine The Great, studded with filth and swearing and vile behaviour like cloves in a ham. It’s a good-looking show, it’s very funny, it’s occasionally quite sweet, and occasionally heartbreaking. It very much has an HBO Prestige TV quality to the ups and downs of character sympathies, but unlike all HBO series except for Deadwood, I like it a lot.
NOTE: I cannot emphasize this enough: this show is really raunchy. And violent.
HUZZAH! <smash>
LIGHTING REALLY IS THAT EASY (BY WHICH I MEAN STILL VERY DIFFICULT).
Look at this tweet from Psychonauts 2 concept artist / lighting designer Derek Brand.
I especially enjoyed the section below about how there are essentially nine combinations of lighting for a character in a scene. This is something I have bumped up against in my own work, most recently in creating those value-study thumbnails. I thought, “surely it must be more complicated then this—surely there must be more ways to do this other than light-character-dark-background, dark-character-light-background.”
If I am to understand Derek correctly, nope. That’s it. Great!
STATUS UPDATE
Lookin' good. So close to pencils being finished! I didn't think it would happen before the end of December, but it's totally doable!
Whoof, that's more stuff than I thought it would be. Everyone look after yourselves out there.
TC
Comments
Geo Neo
I had an Art History lecturer who said the difference between a good painting and a great one, is a great one will have a dog in it. Then proceeded to show us countless great paintings featuring dogs. So as soon as I read "Art History 101" I immediately looked for the dog.
Tony Cliff
To answer your question re: confidence: that's a tricky one. It depends what kind of confidence you're talking about. As I am making a book, I generally feel confident that "this is the best work I can be doing!" Then, I will look at it later and think, "I wish I had spent more time on that drawing." Now, if we're talking about confidence in regards to "I know what makes a good book," I have never felt less confident. At the very start, decades ago, I felt dead certain I knew what would make the very best comic book ever. Now, however, I just don't know. But generally—and maybe this is outside the scope of what you asked—maybe confidence is overrated. Happiness and success lies, I think, in not being confident, but pushing through anyway. You probably know how obnoxious overconfidence can be when you see it in others. I think it's okay to say, "I am not confident that what I'm doing will be successful," and then do it anyway. (I have not read Les Indes Fourbes, but it looks pretty. Thank you for the recommendation!)
Camila Espinosa
Oh, love this Tony! the pencils are just *chef's kiss* Man that quote from G Saunders is incredible. I wonder how you go on about building that confidence in your work other than making it, finishing it, sharing it, and then doing that over and over again. I'm just starting out with comics, and sometimes the insecurity is paralysing! do you feel more confident every time you finish a book? Also, Have you read Les Indes Fourbes? It's a historical adventure bd, it's got historical adventure and lots of Velasquez references, if you haven't already, check it out, it is incredible!
