Tuesday, November 2, 2010

You got STYLE, kid!



Howdy, Meat-Heads!

Eric just got a brand-new suit, and doesn't he look sharp! With this in mind I want to talk a bit about style. I've been having style issues lately, in terms of how I do things, how I want to do things, and how it seems things should be done. Style can get pretty tricky. We all have an idea in our heads of how we want our work to look, and sometimes after a while you find that your tastes have changed. This can really wreak havoc on how you approach certain things.

As I said a while back, one of my main hangups when it came to actually starting Dead Meat was feeling that I wasn't up to snuff in drawing ability, and in a similar vein I felt stylistically I wasn't at a point where my work felt real. That might be a weird way to describe it, but I think you know what I'm talking about: some times your work just doesn't feel like it's real--like it's a cohesive, competent work--and then sometimes it does. It wasn't until the past couple years that I really got a handle on the way I draw, and the way I like my comics to look. Strangely enough, my current style is sort of an amalgam of a bunch of different avenues I tried out separately. Here's a guide of the visual evolution of the character of Foley from Dead Meat:
Figure 1: the earliest depiction of the character, obviously. Now, some people might actually like that style, but to me, it wasn't what I was looking for. It didn't feel real. It was unrefined, the anatomy is garbage, and the level of skill just wasn't up to my own demands.
Figure 2: This is the first evolution of my style. Up until then I never inked my own stuff, and I think you can see that here--the inking is pretty scratchy and not very intelligent. However, in terms of acting and body language, I think this is a huuuuge jump from Figure 1. I still didn't feel like it was what I wanted though.
Figure 3: This is where everything changed. Figure 3 is when I felt like I broke through the wall. I'm much more confident in my inking, and my discovery of all the ways you can use a white-out pen really rocketed my work forward. This is how I wanted my work to look. This is the first time it felt "real."
Figure 4: This is how it looks today, 10 years after I first started drawing the character. I've refined what I started in Figure 3, and I've also added some ink wash for effect that I think adds a cool look to everything. By the same token, I find myself drifting away from the white-out pen. I still use it a lot, but I'm a little more confident with it now, and don't feel the need to cover the entire page with white-out scratches.

Similarly, even though I'm happy with my current style, I find that it's still changing. The problem now is, I'm not totally sure where it's going, and I'm not sure if I like that. Working on this book has caused me to have to change the way I work a little, to increase my speed, and I get worried that the way my style changes from here on out will be because of time restrictions, and not because of me getting better, but at the same time I do feel that the more I do the better I get, so it's really tough to say.

I'll touch on some of the ways I've specifically changed my process in a future post, but for now, I'd love to hear all of your thoughts on style and change in your own style, regardless of your creative field, so feel free to discuss in the comment section!

Until next time,

Eat Dead Meat!

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