Completely Fucking Pointless

I started drawing again this week.

Regular readers will remember that about a year ago I went through one of my classic ‘phases’ where all I wanted to do was draw. I ended up all but stopping because I’d hit a definite plateau. I’d improved by a huge amount over a relatively short period, but I’d just stopped getting any better.

This happens a lot with me. There’s not much I can’t pick up and become at least proficient at in a fairly small amount of time, but soon after that I’ll hit a wall and it takes a major effort to break through it.

It turned drawing from something I did for fun into something I dreaded. I’d draw something, see it was wrong, know what was wrong, but no matter what I did I couldn’t ‘fix’ it. As a result, the sketchbook came out less and less until it spent the last year in my bottom drawer.

A few days ago, I was browsing the internet and came across an amazing sketch and I thought “Hmm, that would look awesome if it was properly inked and colored.” I had nothing better to do, so I went ahead and did it. I might be a novice at drawing, but inking and coloring in photoshop is something I’m actually very good at.

I won’t post the result here, for the simple reason I don’t have permission from the artist. My point is, it whetted my apetite for drawing again, so my sketchbook finally saw some daylight again.

It wasn’t long before I was frustrated again. I improved a little bit but that was more from me ‘shaking the rust off’. I was right back in the same place I was when I stopped the first time.

Now, some of you may be thinking “Yeah, but why don’t you just practice?” My answer to that is a simple one. You can’t improve if you don’t know what you’re doing wrong.

Finally I figured I needed some instruction. Art lessons were a no-go because I don’t have the time and I don’t know of any in the area that specialize in the style I like…so I decided my best course of action was to buy a book.

I got a couple by Christopher Hart. The guy’s an artist for Marvel, and the books were based on comic book art, awesome right? Just what I was looking for.

Except that those books are…and let me be completely fair on this…complete and utter shit that I wouldn’t even use as toilet paper through fear of insulting my asshole.

You see, these are ‘How To…” books where the author doesn’t actually remember to tell you how to do anything. They consist of a few paragraphs and a bunch of Marvel artwork.

It reads like a tip book but with tips that seemed to be purposefully designed not to be helpful in any way. Example

“Always draw hero characters in strong poses.”

“Be expressive and compose your panels dynamically.”

“Eyes are expressive and give your character most of their mood.”

“Make sure your characters look three dimensional”

In other words, beginners have no idea how to actually follow those tips and intermediate artists are “Well, duh!”

I mean, shouldn’t a ‘how to’ book tell you how to draw strong poses? How to ‘dynamically compose’ a panel?

‘Make your characters look three dimensional’? Yeah, fucker, I bought this book to learn how to do that! Telling me to make my characters three dimensional and showing my how to do that are two completely different things.

Oh, and just to add insult to injury, after this literary abortion, I downloaded and out-of-print book called "Figure drawing without a model"...you know what that book's big advice was? Draw with a model until you're good enough to not need one.

Isn't that a lot like me writing a book entitled "Live Comfortable without an Income!"...and then write a book where I tell you to work your ass off for the next 50 years, save your money and then live off your savings?