Month: April 2011 Page 1 of 3

For general all-around drawing information, the famous Andrew Loomis books are great.
Figure Drawing for all it’s Worth – Jim said, “Figure Drawing For All It’s Worth has the best section on perspective I’ve seen.”
Drawing the Head and Hands
The Andrew Loomis books are out of print but can be downloaded here:
http://alexhays.com/loomis

Our buddy Kyle has done a wonderful, essential book on cartooning and comics:
Kyle Baker, How to Draw Stupid and other Essentials of Cartooning

Will Eisner has some highly regarded books available. Best for more advanced students:
Comics and Sequential Art: Principles and Practices from the Legendary Cartoonist

The classic style guide no writer should be without:
The Elements of Style by Strunk and White

Some good information on writing are Syd Field’s Screenwriting books:
Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting

The Screenwriter’s Workbook (Revised Edition)

The Screenwriter’s Problem Solver: How to Recognize, Identify, and Define Screenwriting Problems

Also:
The Craft of the Screenwriter by John Brady

William Goldman: Five Screenplays with Essays
William Goldman – Four Screenplays
These are a couple of Jim’s favorite books:
Great to read if you want to write science fiction:
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space by Carl Sagan

Fascinating book written by a cultural anthropologist:
Our Kind: Who We Are, Where We Came From, Where We Are Going by Marvin Harris

(continued)

Storytelling Lecture Series, Part 11 (Edited from the transcript of a 1994 seminar)

Now, I’m going to tell you a whole bunch of other stuff that may not mean anything much to you yet, but then I’m going to walk you through a particular comic book and I’m going to show you examples. These are little miscellaneous tidbits of info that I’ve had beaten into my head by various Learned Masters over the years. Simple little concepts and observations that are useful for artists. As always, writers should understand these things, too. They’ll help you be a better visual thinker. 

As you walk around the world you see things at eye level. Am I right? You don’t usually walk around standing on your head, or with your head tilted.  You see things like you’re seeing me now, from your eye level, looking directly at the subject. That is the most common point of view, obviously. That is the easiest one for people to grasp instantly.  Show something, anything, in the way people would ordinarily see it and they have the best chance of understanding instantly what you’re showing them.  So, if I have one shot to let somebody know we’re in a theater, this kind of shot, eye level, is most likely to be clear at a glance.  It’s what you’d see if you were there.  A natural point of view. 

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Storytelling Lecture Series, Part 9

The first great secret of drawing better is using your eyes.  Don’t laugh.  Once, with another group, I leaned an umbrella against a door and asked them to draw it.  I gave them a minute, I think.  I watched them.  Most of them glanced at the umbrella, then hardly looked up from their paper.  Some got the umbrella more or less right, but made it too tall or too short in comparison with the door.  Some made the door too narrow or too wide.  Some were so worried about the umbrella that they got the door handle entirely wrong.  One guy drew an umbrella that wasn’t furled and strapped—basically, he just made one up, rather than draw the one in front of him.

A lot of people just don’t use their eyes enough.  You need to really look, measure and compare elements of your drawing to each other.  How tall is the umbrella compared to the door?  Does it come up past the door handle?  And you need to draw the actual umbrella.   

I find that even people who draw pretty well just plain don’t look with care at all the elements.  They’ll get most parts of a figure right but fake the wrinkles on the sportcoat.  You see, without trying or even noticing, we’ve all learned a bunch of glyphs—symbols for things—and they have a way of creeping into and weakening our drawings.  You get the sportcoat right, but do your wrinkle glyph on the sleeves at the elbows.  You’ll get a person’s face right, then do your hair glyph.  You’ll get the building right but draw window glyphs instead of the real windows.

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Storytelling Lecture Series, Part 8 (Edited from the transcript of a 1994 seminar)Around the turn of the 20th Century, two new media were invented. Okay, some scholar is going to correct me and say the first movie was actually made in the 1860’s, and Scott McCloud thinks hieroglyphics were comics, but work with me, here. As mainstream, commercial ventures, film and comics got started in the mid 1890’s. Before that, live performances were pretty much the only visual presentations, unless you count stereoscopes. Some books had illustrations, yes, but they were superfluous. Didn’t need them to understand the story. Live performances, of course, were on stage and seen from a theater seat—and that’s exactly how early film and comics were presented, from a point of view as if from a theater seat.

Then, one day, some actor walked up to D.W. Griffith’s camera and stuck his tongue out, and when the film was developed, they discovered close ups! Kidding. But, anyway, filmmakers and comics artists soon discovered that there were different kinds of shots. I will now show you the three kinds of shots.

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Storytelling Lecture Series, Part 7 (Edited from the transcript of a 1994 seminar)

I want to get onto the artwork. Writers pay attention. A lot of this applies to you as well. This is a two-part medium. It’s visual and verbal.

We’re in the business of storytelling. Because of the unique combination of the visual and verbal, a lot of the burden of storytelling falls upon the penciler. The penciler’s not just an artist, he’s half of the writer. And a writer should not be just a writer, he should think visually, be a visual storyteller, he should be half of the artist.

Sometimes, when the artist and writer are the same person, it really works well, but it often works very well when it’s a collaboration like Lee and Ditko, Lee and Kirby, or Goodwin and Simonson. Sometimes a collaboration is even better than a solo act, because two good storytellers in tandem come up with stuff neither one could alone. Two can be better than one. So, writers, if you can’t draw, don’t despair. But learn to think visually. Pencilers, artists, learn about writing.  I don’t care if you’re aren’t a wordsmith, learn the principles, understand the goals. As they say in Hollywood, “do the math.” Learn how to do the math.

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Storytelling Lecture Series, Part 6 (Edited from the transcript of a 1994 seminar)

I’m going to walk you quickly through a movie called Rocky. I’ll just touch on a few scenes from Rocky that basically will illustrate some of what I’m talking about in terms of building these things into the story. Rocky’s not high art but is impeccably constructed. It’s like level two. It’s a story, it’s a good story because it has a lot of bits in it. I think Stallone did make a stab at trying to say something, but he ain’t no Mark Twain.

What’s the first scene in Rocky? Rocky’s in the ring. He’s not in a tux. He’s not at the opera. He’s in an arena. The guy’s a fighter. The event that happens in the ring is a little taste of what the whole thing is about. In a way you can think of it as a comic book. It’s a splash page. Hi, here’s who I am. Rocky’s in the ring and he’s fighting, and the manager’s screaming at him because he should win this fight but he’s losing. He just doesn’t have the killer instinct. However, when the other guy cheats and then it sort of upsets Rocky’s sense of justice, fair play, and manhood, then he knocks the guy out. That’s Rocky.

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Storytelling Lecture Series, Part 5 (Edited from the transcript of a 1994 seminar)

Let me tell you a little bit about some other structural things that you may need to know. You heard me say, “Introduce your characters” a couple of times. What does that mean? What I mean by that is, whenever you are trying to establish your status quo, Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet, you have the same duty as the newspaper reporter–who, what, when, where, why, how. You’ve got to give them a clue about what that status quo is so they can understand how it’s disrupted. That means also understanding who these characters are.

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Storytelling Lecture Series, Part 4 (From the transcript of a 1994 seminar)

(JayJay here. I posted this blog straight from the transcript, but once Jim got a bit of a break, he touched it up. Here is his edited version.)

I like Mark Twain. He was good. Take Huckleberry Finn for example. That’s a great piece of writing. It’s about this boy, Huck, who has been taught since birth that certain people are property, they have no rights, no worth except as slaves, and if you help one of them run away or you let one of them escape, you’re going to hell because it’s evil to do so. In the story, Twain makes this clear, so we understand the situation, the status quo, and of course he introduces the characters. We read about the disruptive element that sends this story into motion—both Jim the slave and Huck are driven by circumstances to run away.  They fall in together, and travel down the Mississippi on a raft. The conflicts that are raised are wonderfully interesting, and Twain brings the characters alive so well, that we really relate to them.

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