Anatomy and Calvin

Well, today I decided after a some-what lengthy perusal through the Pencil Jack Forums that I would try to start to learn some anatomy. As I'm sure anyone who's tried to draw from imagination can agree, it's pretty difficult to be convincing when you're drawing from your brain if you don't have a good foundation of anatomy in there. Good thing, however, that I have bought some books in the past that have just layed dormant until today. Anywho, here's a little doodle I copied out of the book. It's the first step on my way to not sucking as hard.




The second thing I have for everyone today is a goofy little Calvin and Hobbes doodle I whipped up really quick as an excuse to gush about Bill Watterson's work, and also as an excuse to get used to having a stylus in my hand again. I drew it old-fashioned with a pen and paper (fancy that!). I colored it in Photoshop, though. Anywho, here it is:

HERE, it's too big

Now, onto gushing about Watterson. I've been reading Calvin and Hobbes since I can remember. I own just about all of the books as well, as I'm sure any self-respecting Waterson fan does. One of the things that I always found particularly amazing about Waterson's work was his ability to tell so much with so little. His mark and line work is usually fairly simple and yet, it conveys exactly what he's going for. His black and white strips have just as much presence as his colored strips. He used line in a very nice way. His lines weren't all over the place, and usually had a lot of open forms. This gave an airy, free feel to his linework, even though it was definitely put down with very specific intentions.

His coloring was even more spectacular, as his color, while inside the lines, also had it's own presence. He used the color to define shapes just as much as he did line. Take, for example, Calvin's hat-puff in the above picture. I didn't copy his line work exactly, I only had a thin tip sharpie, but that's besides the point. The essence of Calvin's puff is still there. What I'm getting to is the fact that he didn't draw that entire puff. He drew some lines there and then colored to make that puff. It would look like a puff even in black in white, but it really looks like a puff in color.

Watersons ability to put realistic drawings (like the comics where Calvin goes to the museum and imagines dinosaurs, etc.) next to his cartoon characters was also awe-inspiring. Not to mention his rendering capabilites were amazing. Waterson was great at doing environments when he felt there needed to be one. The Spaceman Spiff environments are some of the coolest enviornments I've seen done in comic format since Windsor McKay. Waterson pulled it off in a usually far more simpler way, but still in a very efficient and elegant way.

Waterson is a big influence on my work in just about every way.