I'm an Idiot and I Forgot to Upload. Better Late than Never?

Ah... Mignola. How I love thee. A friend was borrowing my Hellboy Library Editions as he visited my place, one and three specifically since they're the only ones I own, he wanted to do some studies of his art and I've been more than supportive of his forays into the fields of art. I became a bit jealous and decided to join him. Flipping to a random page on the third Hellboy Library Edition, the random flip brought me to his The Island series that Mignola had drawn and I decided to emulate the figure of the Priest as well as I can.  Like with most of Mignola's work from this late 90s and early 2000s era of his comic book illustrations, the Priest in The Island had struck itself deep in my mind's eye as a major foundation in my visual library.  I still maintain this to be my personal favorite era of Mignola's art but his 80s work is a very good contender as well.

I also wanted to play around with some cartooning and expressions. I dusted off one of my favorite abstractions from life, my rendition of the rat. You can call it a mouse, I've also heard it called a puppy. It doesn't matter. It's kinda cute and it's rodent-ish. It's good enough for me. Finding fun ways to play around with balancing and making an appealing little abstract figure are fun too. I need to do this more.

Some recent figure drawing exercises I've done. I like these a lot lately.

The Importance of Planning

How some artists like Jack Kirby are able to just draw full pages without much thought and get what they want out of them is beyond me. To be able to put pencil to paper and just let your arm and the graphite do its magic takes a certain skill or imagination not with me. Borrowing Kelley Jones' term for someone who has had an extreme influence on one's art, I am much like my "art father" Mike Mignola. I cannot just have my way with the page, I need to plan carefully only to destroy some pages after much thought as they do not satisfy a certain level of quality that I expect of myself. An extreme form of this problem is what had happened to Mike Mignola as he was writing and drawing what I believe was Hellboy: The Island. It may very well be the reason too as to why the artist changed from Mike to Duncan Fregredo from The Wild Hunt onwards up until The Fury, only coming back to the drawing board as the writer-artist for Hellboy in Hell. In any case, I'm in my own mini-The Island phase right now. I want to draw but I can't get myself to like my own craft nor my compositions. Oh well... Some mild bitching from me is the most one would be getting from for now. Till next week.

These are the abandoned The Island pages, carefully penciled and inked but still abandoned. Just like the two pages I've done so far!

This page is particularly powerful in my memories. Fifth panel, left-most face. That face is seared into my memory, likely forever.

The art from this point onwards is from the Mike Mignola-Duncan Fregredo era of the Hellboy comics. These are all from The Wild Hunt.

I Remembered that I'm a Slow Writer

I always underestimate how slow I am as a writer. Oh well, that "short" brush essay
 won't be coming any time soon, assuming you count a six-pager and counting on TNR font 12 as short. As I won't come out with that any time soon, I'll just go back to posting some sketches for now and talking about my stupid reading in the arts.

In the past month or two, I've felt as though I've stagnated and the fluidity and weight and motion that I've come to develop has ended. My figures felt stiffer and it was depressing. I blame myself for having seen that one Danny Galieote video on the asymmetry of the body and how it balances itself out in the contrasting curve as you will see below. Strangely enough, seeing the asymmetric curves again in the work of Michael Hampton's Figure Drawing: Design and Invention made it clock in my head and add something to my work that Danny Galieote took away. I like having more life and energy in my drawings again. He also broke my mental prison of trying to stay in proportion while making thirty-second sketches. As long as you capture the emotion and comprehensibility of the pose, it's good.

Some sketches I'm really proud of post-Hamptonian revitalization.

Drawn on my small whiteboard.

Another angle.

Hampton just pushed my head back into another direction, a good one. I really appreciate it. I'm more confident and happy with my work now.

The next few drawings will be assorted in subject and who was with me when I made them, the first being a riff with my friend. I'll post more of those drawings with him in the coming weeks. He came over and we had fun with all my paper and markers. I introduced him to the asymmetric curves and he's just so happy with his art now. Good for him. He's learning!