All Drawn Out - Final Thoughts

Session #15

Do you have to be able to draw like Leonardo da Vinci oto

illustrate a children's book?

(Whoops, change slides - the drawing above was made by

Michelangelo.)

Must you know artistic anatomy backwards and forwards like

our book and magazine illustration forefathers?

Would it be great if your children's book paintings evoked the

work of the old school illustrators like N.C. Wyeth or Jessie

Wilcox Smith or Kate Greenaway?

No. No. And not necessarily.

Classic figurative illustration does not show up so much in

our pop culture as it did in Andrew Loomis's or Norman

Rockwell's time. Photography trumped it a while ago.

Magazines in particular seem to have left drawing and

painting behind in the dust. (Except the art magazines and a

few kids' magazines)

Almost nobody draws like that anymore. It's not the the stuff

of children's book art at present. There may be a place for it

in comics, graphic novels, animation, digital games, and the

fine art galleries.

But you don't have to draw like Francis Bacon, or lock

yourself away in an atelier for years of figure study to

illustrate for kids.

You still have to draw people, children, animals in a way that

feels right to you.

They'll 'feel right' if you can get the proportions, the

relationships roughly right. And when I say proportions, I

mean from heads to toes. Hands fingers and thumbs, too.

So your work does not look uninformed.

Practice drawing people and children until you come up with

your way, your own language and shorthand for them.

Think of them as animated forms.

Be clear-eyed and honest now in your self-evaluations. But

don't be too hard on yourself.

Your approach would vary according to the age of the

audience of your story. Older kids love the realism and keen

detail that would leave younger children indifferent.

Drawing people is a muscle that gets better as you do it

every day. One way to practice is by working on your line

drawings for your illustrations.

There is a wealth of published material on drawing (online

and off.) It's more accessible now than it has ever been.

So as are the rich examples of the work of Old School artists

and illustrators than it has ever before.

The danger is overload and overwhelm.

Don’t let yourself be confused.

Be receptive to the information/instruction as it finds you.

Don't get so caught up in making your representations that

that you forget that your primary job as an illustrator is

something else.

Something more important than rendering the world with

truth and beauty.

It's putting on a show.

And you thought we were through with Gilbert & Sullivan.

Sir Arthur Sullivan, the son of a military bandmaster, was

proficient at every instrument in his father's band by age 8.

At the tender age of 14 he won a Mendelssohn Scholarship

that basically took him through four years of study at the

Royal Academy of Music and the Leipzig Conservatoire

where he was immersed in the orchestral compositions of

Schubert, Verdi, Bach and Wagner.

When he returned from Germany, he was a musical rising

star.

But, despite the commissions that came his way, he still had

to give piano and singing lessons, and work as a church

organist to make ends meet.

He also wrote hymns, including two you might have heard of:

"Onward, Christian Soldiers" and "Nearer, my God, to Thee."

He mastered composition and the technicalities of

orchestration.

He could do anything: Operas, ballets, choral works,

symphonies, popular parlor songs, stirring marches, jaunty

rolling sea shanties, funny songs, lilting madrigals, soaring

waltzes, beautiful romantic ballads.

Gorgeous melody seemed to pour from him (though he said

it was hard work and he “had to dig for it.”)

Eventally Sullivan, England's top composer, was paired with

England's top stage writer, the witty and highly original

William Gilbert.

Why am I telling you all of this?

Because Arthur Sullivan had the subordinate job in the

Gilbert and Sullivan productions.

Sir Arthur Sullivan

The lyrics came first. Gilbert would write the words to what

he hoped would be songs and deliver them to Sullivan.

Sullivan would study Gilbert's rhymes until he found a beat

that he would work his musical magic around.

He called it “setting the music to the words.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf9jXlX6l0A

Of course the two men would tweak and perfect the songs in

rehearsals. (You can read a fascinating essay about their give

and take here:http://web.ukonline.co.uk/ajcrowth/buxton2000.htm )

It was more of a collaboration than you'll generally find

between children's authors and their illustrators.)

Sir William Gilbert

For Gilbert and Sullivan the play was the thing.

A consummate professional, Sullivan knew and believed, that

his notes should serve Gilbert's words and ideas.

A Gilbert and Sullivan musical is what of a good children's

picture book should be – a tale-telling greater than the sum

of its parts.

A blissful fusion of language and music (or in our case

pictures.)

So we can pretend to be Arthur Sullivan providing the visual

music for our book.

We begin by creating in our sketchbooks the story's cast.

My attempts to come up with a Hispanic girl character out of my head --

an exercise given us by Priscilla Burris http://www.priscillaburris.com/ , national illustration adviser for the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators(SCBWI) at our Austin, Texas SCBWI chapter's Illustrators Day.

After we get our characters down, we build our stage sets

around them.

Then we build the theater our play will be shown in.

Huh? That means we create a context, a frame for the viewer

to see our story unfold in.

“Lynne and Tessa”

Something like this.

We do this in order to manage the viewer's expectations of

what she'll see in the narrative. We make the frame is part of

the picture.

“Lynne and Tessa” (above) became world-wide Internet stars

the summer after they graduated from high school in

Frankfurt, Germany.

They did it by winning the 2006 Google International “Pop

Idol” Webcam |Competition -- a contest of

lip synched amateur music videos uploaded to Google Video.

They performed Karaoke music routines to English language

pop songs from the nineties, starting with Aqua's ‘Barbie Girl’

and moved on to songs by Tom Jones, Ricki Martin, Back

Street Boys, No Doubt, Michael Jackson and Blink and others.

They generated something like 10 million hits in a short time.

After a few weeks, they stopped doing their videos and

returned to their lives. Lynne and Tessa aren’t even their real

names.

What made them so popular?

http://video.google.com/videosearch?

q=Lynne+and+Tessa+move+your+feet&hl=en&emb=0&aq=

f#

http://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=KYRGQ71e72s&feature=fvsr

http://www.lynnetessa.de/

http://www.lynnetessa.de/movies,en,,37-Don%27t-

Speak.htm

http://www.lynnetessa.de/movies,en,,38-Get-Down.htm

How did they steal all those hearts around the globe?

They're natural clowns, express the music with complete

abandon and they're cute to boot.

But I think a big part of their fun is they are keenly conscious

of the frame established by their fixed webcam.

And they play to its mundane limitations, like good stage

troupers.

They take turns going in and out of the rectangle, pulling

props, like the roses, into their scenes. They move back and

forth, take turns upstaging each other.

Lynne pretends to descend out of the frame riding in an

elevator, or she clops down imaginary stairs out of view.

They invite us to pretend with them.

The set is always the same – “Lynne's” bedroom with its blue

walls and the cat lurking in the background.

They never apologize for the static shot and the humble

background. The limitation, the confinement is part of the

show.

It’s as if their imaginations takes flight from the room.

And so ours do, too. I call it the “Lynne and Tessa” factor.

And I say you want that in your illustration.

I'm not sure how to tell you how to do it.

Have your perspective down pat. The viewer knows that

you're distorting the space and fooling him, but he doesn't

mind because you're doing it skillfully.

Be conscious of a frame around your scene. Put one there.

Make up something that suggests or evokes enclosure.

Acknowledge that your scene has a border and so, physical

limits. Celebrate those limits with your viewer who will be

turning your pages.

Maurice Sendak has always been conscious of that notion of

'illustration as stage set.'

Most of his story in Higglety Pigglety Pop! takes place on an

actual stage. It's a nursery rhyme recast as a gently

choreographed musical inside a book.

We readers become a charmed audience in a mostly empty

theater.

There's a feeling that you're 'watching a play' in so much

of Sendak imagery.

There are the actual sets and costumes he's designed for

Mozart's The Magic Flute and Tschaikovsky's The Nutcracker

Suite.

But it's just as obvious in two page spread 'set piece' in a

book like Where the Wild Things Are.

Sendak knows that his job as an illustrator is making a

melodrama inside a small compressed picture space.

He knows that the artificiality, the make-believe that the

artist and viewer co-create is most of the fascination of the

illustration.

More fascinating, perhaps, than truth and beauty.

He's on to the “Lynne and Tessa” factor.

By Howard Pyle

Howard Pyle, the great illustrator and teacher of illustration

at the turn of the century took the Lynne and Tessa factor a

step further. He urged his students to be the actors in the

stage space.

An illustrator in the service of his story had to assume all its

roles, Pyle said.

Portray each character in the cast.

Kids do this naturally when they draw.

I remember doing it -- being the character in my scene,

scrunching up my face to get the expression, taking on the

shape and posture, mimicking and miming as I drew,

pushing myself absolutely into that space I was making up

on my sheet.

And then doing it all over again for the next character in the

scene.

I bet you've done it, too.

Howard Pyle

Pyle would dress up in costumes for the stories he was

illustrating – and would dress up others, too – friends and

family -- to strike the poses and help him act out scenes.

(Amateur theatricals were a big social activity anyway in

those fins-de-siecle days.) Cheaper than hiring models,

right? Of course when necessary he hired the models, too.

I call this 'being the characters' the Howard Pyle Theorem.

Illustrators are actors, he would say.

It builds on the “Lynne and Tessa” factor,

This idea that the illustrator wants the viewer to be aware, at

some level, of the artificiality of the show being staged for his

delight.

Looney Tunes collaborators Tex Avery and Michael Maltese

Cartoon animators of course subscribe to the Howard Pyle

Theorem.

They know they must be the characters in order to draw

them truthfully.

They are also exaggeraters, pushing every behavior and

facial expression to its unabashed extreme.

Like actors do on stage --playing stuff large so the folks in

the back rows can see.

It's what kids do. It's how they self-express, communicate

their emotions.

They blow up their movements and responses, when they're

trying to make a point. They take it all over-the-top.

This insight by the way, isn't mine. It comes from the

extremely talented children's illustrator Patrice Barton.

http://patricebarton.com/ She talks about it in her

presentations. If you ever see her (and ask nicely) she might

even demonstrate for you. (She does the best kid and teen

impersonations!)

By Patrice Barton

Patrice, by the way, recommends:

Cartoon Animation by Preston Blair

http://www.animationarchive.org/2006/05/media-preston-

blairs-animation-first.html

http://www.amazon.com/Cartoon-Animation-Collectors-

Preston-Blair/dp/1560100842

Illustration by Patrice Barton

So now get our your scissors and glue-sticks.

Another wonderful children’s illustrator, Molly Bang,

http://www.mollybang.com/bio.html

wrote a knockout thought provoking book, Picture This:

Perception and Composition (Bullfinch Press, Little Brown).

http://www.mollybang.com/Pages/picture.html

It's about how shapes and how you place them in space can

create predictable emotions in a viewer.

When she was teaching herself illustration, Molly also taught

story-making to third and, later. eighth graders in the

Cambridge, Massachusetts public schools.

Working with the children, she cut up colored construction

paper and used the pieces to tell Little Red Riding Hood.

She discovered some interesting truths from the children's

reactions.

“I tried to figure out what elements were making the pictures

scarier or less scary, tried to figure out how all the elements

related to each other,” she writes. “Gradually, I began to

understand something about how the structural elements of

pictures affect us.”

Her findings go straight into the heart of human perception:

• .Smooth flat horizontal shapes give us a sense ofstability and calm.

• Vertical shapes are more exciting and more active,because they rebel against the earth’s gravity. They

imply energy and a reaching toward the heights of the

heavens.

• Diagonal shapes are dynamic because they imply motionor tension.

• Pictures – and human perceptions – are based oncontrast.

She's come up with some interesting conclusions about how

we regard shapes in the picture space. Like these:

“The picture contains a space all its own. We exist outside

the picture until our eyes fix on and ‘capture’ an object inside

it like prey. But they in turn draw us inside the picture

space...”

“The movement of the picture is determined as much by the

space between the shapes as by the spaces between the

shapes themselves. We want to leave each element as an

integral piece, unbroken, inviolate. We want to allow space

around each one. The overlapping object ‘pierces’ or violates

the space of the other, but this also joins them together into

a single unit.”

She suggests cutting out shapes from colored construction

paper that approximate elements in our drawings and placing

them around different ways on a white sheet to see how they

relate with each other and the white of the paper.

It's a technique fine artists have used to decide how to set up

still life compositions.

For Molly, the purpose is a little different. She’s rearranging

to see how to extract the most emotion from her shapes and

their placements. She's finding a way to help tell her folktale

most effectively.

She also recommends experimenting with the pieces

themselves – accentuating their shapes with your scissors to

maximize their impact in your scene.

It's a great idea – abstracting your subjects into their ‘most

telling’ primal shapes. (Visual artists should always be

thinking about how simplify their subjects anyway.)

I think you could accomplish a lot of this, quickly just with

your pencil doing your 30 second flash/gesture scribbles.

But Molly brings out the ideas. For her, design is deep human

psychology.

Her articulation might help you to regard your scribbles in

more thoughtful, sophisticated ways.

You’ll be quicker to see the unconscious content in them.

There's much more, but I don't want to steal her thunder.

Picture This is so grounded, so basic and useful that I think it

really belongs on every children's illustrator's shelf. It's what

a design book should be.

Originally published in hard cover by Little, Brown, Picture

This is now available in sturdy paperback from Chronicle

Books at the usual book retail outlets.

You may be able to order one of the few remaining original

hardcover editions directly from her. Go to her website

www.mollybang.com or e-mail her at mgbbooks@aol.com .

When you've completed your full sketch, you can make a

photocopy of it.

Slap it to the back of your 90 lb. Hot pressed Arches

watercolor paper with two tiny pieces of Magic Scotch Tape

Place it on your lightbox with the taped photocopy

sandwiched between the bright screen of the lightbox and

your watercolor sheet.

And trace with a number two pencil and a light easy touch

(keeping your kneaded eraser handy.)

It's called transferring your sketch to a painting surface.

Notice above how clearly the sketch (or the photocopy of the

sketch) is seen through the watercolor paper.

I think that strip actually was 140 lb cold pressed paper,

which is thicker and more textured than the hot pressed 90

lb. Paper. It seems it would be harder to see through.

Yet you can see how the original image beneath it is still

remarkably visible.

The images get crisper, of course, if you press down a bit the

watercolor paper on top of the copy or original sketch as you

trace.

Light boxes don't have to be anything fancy.

They're so affordable now. Prices have come down

dramatically as digital art and photos have taken over what

used to be called commercial art.

You can find them at art and engineering supply houses on

line and or shop the online classifieds. Or you can ask around

on the art and illustration forums,like our Children's Book

Illustration Group on Wiggio.

This one you see in the picture was given to me by my

brother who I think used it to help sort his astronomy slides

and do astronomical sketchings and tracings with.

I drove from Houston to Austin with it one night, and noticed

at the end of the trip that the plug and and many feet of cord

had been dragging behind me on the highway the whole

distance. It still works, though!

You don't have to labor too long over the light box.

Just get the basic outlines traced.

Then you can return to your drawing table with your sheet

and your sketch and complete the details and

embellishments.

Simply copy freehand on your watercolor sheet, the

remaining fine details of your sketch. You can take your time

with it in the comfort of your regular perch.

Pay extra attention to the quality of your line as you mark on

the watercolor paper.

The joy of this process is if you do mess up on the painting,

you still have your original sketch, and/or photocopy of it.

You can always trace it again on the light box.

If you don't want a light box in your life, or have no room for

one, you can still be an illustrator.

You can trace your drawing on to watercolor paper surface

using the glass patio door as your light box and the daylight

outside for your illumination.

There's an even faster way to transfer your drawing.

You can cart it down to a blueprint shop, and pay a little bit

to have it and your 22 X 30 “ full sheet of 90 lb hot pressed

watercolor paper run through a blueprint copier.

These blueprint copiers will print your drawing onto your

painting surface. (The 90 lb paper is just thin enough to get

through the machine.)

It could save you a few hours of tracing and redrawing time.

The drawback is your loss of selectivity. You'll have to live

with every one of those spidery original lines on your sketch,

because there's no erasing them. And the copy ink is not

water soluble, so water won't soften or obliterate them.

A student came to class the other night with a sketch that he

had transferred to his small watercolor sheet with the help of

his home computer ink jet printer.

His little printer had accepted the 90 lb hot press paper,

though the student had to trim his watercolor sheet to letter-

size to be able to feed it through.

He ran off several copies on several small 90 lb. hot-pressed

sheets. We both thought that his prints would smear when

he got them wet.

We painted some washes and tints over them – to see how

the ink would hold up.

It never smeared! It acted like the permanent ink from the

blueprint copiers.

We were excited! We thought that we'd discovered a whole

new efficiency for transferring sketches.

Turns out that watercolor painters have been transferring

their sketches to hot pressed paper with their home printers

for some time.

Again, there's the drawback that you can't erase any of these

lines – unlike with the pencil tracing you make over your

light box.

So the drawings you copy on your printer should be how you

want them to appear in your final watercolor.

So that's it then. We're done with drawing.

You rock for having stayed with us up till now!

You now have most of the rules of the road that you'll need

for drawing. Oh, you'll formulate a few new ones of your own

as you go. You'll be your own drawing teacher from now on.

It's the best way to learn.

Draw a few minutes each day and watch yourself get better.

Designer-Animator-Comics creator Erik Kuntz of Austin drew

a different dog every day for a year and put them up on his

blog. http://www.2badmicedesign.com/

He did not miss one day. Now he can draw dogs blindfolded.

In the next three sessions you'll learn how to turn your

drawings into satisfying full-colored illustrations.

Your homefun:

1.) Look at one of the scenes you've already drawn. Decide

how you might push the composition a little to make it more

theatrical.

2.) Think of something to add to the picture that would

suggest that you and your viewer/reader are engaged in a

game of let's pretend.

3.) Review the Sessions # 5-8 on color, and gather the basic

paints and the couple of brushes discussed in the course

supply list so you'll be ready as we move into the exciting

stage, painting.

Make Your Splashes; Make Your Marks! :

The power course on creating great drawings for

books, magazines and other media for childrenContent © Copyright 2009 by Mark Mitchell