The King is Dead

I got into pop music way too late to have caught the Michael Jackson wave but he was a legend and touched so many lives. The world's reaction is a testament to his greatness.


For the first time I spent some time watching his videos on Youtube. I was watching a song called Beat It when it struck me how expressive and full of gesture his dancing style is.
We may exaggerate people's gestures to create more lively and expressive poses (which they often do in animation), but in Jackson 's case he is that exaggeration. His dancing is constantly pushing the limits... bending, stretching, twisting and turning.

I did a Google image search for "Michael Jackson gesture", and found Alex Woo, who has worked as a story artist on Wall-E. He taught a life drawing class back in 2008 where he used Jackson as an example for gesture drawing and camera awareness (link). He makes the point that Jackson is a master at positioning himself as to create the most striking and readable silhouette against the camera, and that artists shouldn't be afraid of manipulating poses to clarify the action.

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Beat It on Youtube - (link)
Alex Woo - link
Michael Jackson gives some insight into gesture drawing - link

First post from Visby

There's quite a lot I want to talk about. Meeting with the wonderful Yosh and Soya of the Swedish manga collective Yokaj Studio for one, my courses in life drawing and concept art at Gotland University are others, but in the midst of settling in, starting a part time job and keeping up with coursework my time management has proved insufficient so for now I'll update with tonight's view of Visby.

I spent the day working at the university since their computers can handle a lot more than my little laptop. The university is right by the sea and as I started heading back the sun was just setting. Couldn't recall when I saw a sunset last, so I sat down on the wharf, watched the sun go down and sketched a family with two kids sitting on the pebble beach below me. It was very relaxing... just wish the sun hadn't sunk so fast. :)


It's very beautiful here. I feel like there's a new and wonderful scenery to discover every other day. Visby is a great vacation spot especially around early/mid June, before the bulk of the tourists invade. I hear there's quite some night life to be had here as well, although I've yet to experience that. :)

Summer on Gotland

At the moment of writing I'm in Stockholm, sitting in the home of an old acquaintance of the family which is where I've been sleeping for the last two nights. Stockholm is just a intermediate stop. Tomorrow I'm off to Visby and the University of Gotland, where I'll be taking a 10-week course in Life drawing with Pernilla Persson. At the same time, I'll also be doing the long-distance course Concept Art II, led by Leo Sandberg. Looking forward to both!

I didn't use to think that Sweden had much to offer in terms of education for entertainment art, but you never know what a little digging can yield. The great thing about Swedish education is that it's free, and I don't think you need to be a Swedish citizen to benefit from it. Compared to the complicated UK UCAS system, it was so easy for me to register for these courses - a few clicks for the mouse and that was it. Although, that might be because I do in fact have Swedish social security number.


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University of Gotland (HGO) - link
Life Drawing at HGO - link
Concept Art II at HGO - link
Pernilla Persson - link
Leo Sandberg - link

Removing blue lines

The big reason behind using blue lines, apart from helping you see on the paper is that it can be easily removed in Photoshop. The same goes for red and green (RGB), but I just happen to like blue better. The blue pencil that I've fallen in love with is Uni-ball's 0.5 mm soft blue mechanical pencil. Sadly they're not sold in the UK as far as I know, but they're available online from stores like JetPens.

1. Start out by scanning your drawing in colour. I believe that most scanners scan in RGB mode by default. What this means is that the colour in your drawing is split into three channels, Red, Green and Blue.
2. In this case my pencils are blue so what I do is select the Blue channel. All the blue then disappears from the visible image, but it's still there. If your underdrawing was red, you'd click the red channel instead, and similarily for green.
3. In order to get rid of the colour permanently I go to Image>Mode>Grayscale.
4. Finally I adjust the Levels (Image>Adjustments>Levels, or Ctrl+L) to enhance the contrast of the lines. What I've found to work best is to move the rightmost lever a little bit to the left (this gets rid of the greyness of the paper) and the middle lever a bit to the right(which darkens the lines).
   

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JetPens - Shop

Using blue lines

There was a time when I used to think that if you couldn't nail your drawing in the first try, somehow that meant that you were a lesser artist. In recent months after listening to tons of podcasts and learning about different artists working processes I realised that more often that not, most people tend to have some kind of a rough stage.
Illustrators like James Jean can go through several series of roughs, each one gradually tidying up the concept until the final drawing is the end result. It's easy to gloss over the effort behind a well executed and well-planned illustration.

This is some work James Jean did for AND1 Shoes.

The way I draw is pretty sketchy, mostly because I'm not sure exactly what I want so I use all of those sketchy lines as little tendrils to explore possibilities. If things get too messy though, it gets difficult to tidy up and pull out details so I feel limited.
I've praised the usefulness of colour leads in a previous post, but at that point I didn't realised how important this method would become to me. Just about all of the pages in Twelfth Night were drawn by first laying down a rough in blue lines before going in and drawing the details with a normal mechanical pencil.
I believe that what James Jean does is to scan in his roughs, print it out lightly in colour and do the next stage on top of that, which is essentially the same thing.

This is a page of pencils from Twelfth Night which shows my blue lines.


Tomorrow: Removing blue lines

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James Jean artwork courtesy of JJeanius.net
James Jean - Website
Twelfth Night - SelfMadeHero

London Expo portraits

Last weekend (23-24 May) was the May edition of London MCM Expo. I shared a table with Kat and Dave from Studio Two Sides Wide on the Saturday. Since I had literally only just finished Twelfth Night a few days before Expo, there was no time to prepare anything new to sell. Kat came back from a three-week-long trip to Ghana for her university project the same morning of Expo so she didn't have much time to prepare either. To earn back the table cost we started doing on-site commissions, of which "manga portraits" proved the most popular. There was hardly a moment to spare on the Saturday, but the Saturdays are always extremely busy.

Here are a few that were drawn that weekend:

There were also few which I didn't have time to finish during the Expo so I drew them back home. This also gave me a chance to scan the artwork properly.
This group of lovely ladies were cosplaying characters from Negima.

Something I must remember to do next time is to ask people for their eye colour. It's very difficult to see in a blurry photo and since manga eyes are so big, it becomes quite an important piece of information.
For anyone who might be waiting for their portrait and might be reading this, I mailed them out today. :)

There were quite a few people who asked me about my tools. I tend to use Copic Ciao markers for my convention sketches. Copic had a stall at Expo for the first time this year so it was easy to point them in the right direction.

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London MCM Expo, website.
Studio Two Sides Wide, website.
Copic Markers, website.

Twelfth Night is completed!

Last week I finished my work on Twelfth Night for SelfMadeHero.


Since starting the work in October 2008 I think I've learnt a fair amount. For one, that churning out 200 comic pages is no small feat! Mostly it's made me a lot more comfortable with drawing people and poses. During uni I really didn't draw much, so every drawing I did required considerable effort to make it look right. Twelfth Night has helped me figure out and get comfortable with a process that works for me (much thanks to my blue pencil) so drawing difficult poses isn't as daunting any more.
Soon I'll be posting a little bit more about using blue pencil for underdrawing.

Now a little early plugging for the book... Twelfth Night will be out in stores in September 2009! Meanwhile, the article series on the production of the book which I've been writing for NEO magazine will continue in August.
Last weekend a girl came up to my table at London MCM Expo and told me that she had already pre-ordered it which made my day! It is a strange feeling to see the book listed on Amazon before you've even finished it.

It's been a big project with many ups and downs along the way, certainly, but in the end I can't wait to hold the book in my hands, and that should be a good sign.