Some things have been said about working in pencil - new atmospheric possibilities, erasure as metaphor, liminal qualities, etc.
Traditionally the comics penciller is a foggy bridge between transdimensional worlds, using line (2D) to translate mass (3D). Imagine the penciller working in a gestural version of AutoCAD, building, moving, and erasing virtual masses, shifting perspectives - 'down and dirty' sculpture on a dynamic screen. The inker takes these virtual masses and cleans them up - aestheticizes them for the static screen - flattens them. The virtual weight of the pencils is translated into lines - 'line weight' - and crystalized as a 2 dimensional form.
This binary approach to drawing - pencilling vs inking - is the definition of cartooning. When I draw people I draw as an inker, even if I am drawing in pencil. I render 2D lines - aestheticized 2D lines - over mentally projected forms.
What would it mean to draw sculpturally? To view positive and negative space not in a graphic sense but in a spatial sense. To draw without concern of silhouette. To ignore or view with indifference the single fixed camera.
One could easily imagine the fetishization of these techniques - 'poorly' composed drawings, 'random' camera angles - but this would merely be 'anti-2D'. Is virtual sculpture - sculpture created and embedded in the screen - possible without respect to the image? Imagine the sculptor who works only by sight, perhaps from a fixed perspective even. Or imagine the opposite: the blind sculptor working only by touch - doesn't he or she still possess a 'viewpoint' - an objective viewpoint - behind the eyes?
Who was it who said: 'sculpture is experienced in the present, as time and space moving together, and remembered as a series of images'. Comics is memory: a stream of images (or: a bank of images through which we flow). The internet combines the present moment with memory, merges the stream of time with the stream of space, accumulating the present moment into a virtual mass of images.
"[...] the exhibition as a 'photogenic space' to be cut up into sequences by the viewer-actor [...]"
- Nicholas Bourriaud
Perhaps this is the closest to sculpture we can come to: pictorial translation of a virtual 3D space designed with translation in mind. 2D memories of virtual space.
37 comments:
I've never been tempted to leave it finishedc in pencil because I like the variety of textures I can get with ink, a lot of which is collage stuff that never even comes close to a pencil. But I am usually really happy with my pencil sketches and underdrawings and it's too bad that a lot of the texture in those drawings gets lost when I ink over them. I was thinking today I would make some copies or enlargements of my pencil sketches, turn the contrast up to collage parts of them into the inked drawing
maybe comics have a built in "first draft" in the form of pencilling. what "built in" means here would be another discussion.
it's fun to work in a medium where one of the initial stages of process is crucial but sort of half-evaporates by the end.
save it for the "art of..." book, is usually the fucked attitude, eh?
seems like this gets expanded in other mediums explicitly, i.e. various coats of paint, etc. sketchbooks. but in less-spoken ways in "comics" (i.e. computer production, printing, distribution).
so maybe the "sculptural" thing is a thought on the disconnect between drawing and writing, as comics is wont to be. what's so sublime about several drafts that isn't inherent in the process of making them? i feel like this is a banal point, but totally one that is thought about by anyone doing this kind of work.
"cartoonists" don't often work straight to the page. they've got a step of "remove" no matter what. that's what defines cartooning, sort of. is this less or more "work" than other mediums is a useless question.
overby is an extreme example of mulling over and re-visiting concepts long-term, as is any newspaper cartoonist you care to name. JTM is an extreme for similar, but different reasons. still, it seems that "telling stories" rules above all the bullshit. so however you can get them done, one layer of drawing on top another.
The other side of sculpture, the opposite of scalability, is the idea of latent forms hidden within marble or wood or graphite which must be released by a participating agent. This is a better metaphor for me.
I bought Gray's Anatomy in college because I thought I could learn to draw the human body from the inside out. The assumption that there is a form that can be discerned and replicated objectively bothers me. Of course, you can imagine or build (with clay or vectors) simple forms using ideal, stable rules you've decided on, but these are closed systems that exist outsidecof "reality." To me, reality can maybe modelled mathematically, but it would be hard to hold all that information in you head at one time so that you can parse it. I like inking over messy, fuzzy, smudgy pencils to attempt to cauterize bits of actual phenomelogical detritus like Peter Stillman would attempt to name everything in the world.
The lie of comics is the notion that time is a thing that can be broken apart and pieced back together. Memory is very faulty - we are constantly reconstructing our past as we are remembering it.
oh cool, pictures of bones or whatever. Not what I fucking expected when I order a Grey's Anatomy book.Who the fuck would buy this? 9:23 PM Oct 15th, 2010 via web
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But without the machine, what can man rage against?
DARKNESS is the one true actuality, the basis and the root of light, without which the latter could not manifest itself, nor even exist. Light is matter, and DARKNESS pure spirit. Darkness, in its radical, metaphysical basis, is subjective and absolute light; while the latter, in all it’s seeming effulence and glory, is merely a mass of shadows, as it can never be eternal, and is simply an illusion. -HPB
Waaaahhh!. Relating-a-word-I-used-to-a-stupid-artist-thereby-claiming-I'm-a-shallow-hipster-coat-tail-rider-is-very-clever!
aka I-can-only-experience-the-sublime-via-horror-manga. Face!
If the figure of discipline was the worker-prisoner, the figure of control is the debtor-addict. Cyberspatial capital operates by addicting its users...
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I blew up a pencil sketch and pasted it onto a blank piece of paper as the start of the finished drawing. This is the most efficient way to ink a pencil sketch--scan it and print it out. If you imagine the 3d and the 2d worlds of pencil/ink as two separate spheres, then this process is like building a bridge between the spheres. Or probably one of the spheres would be a circle, so maybe it's like drawing a circle onto a sphere and then drawing a bridge in between them. I don't understand the spatial metaphors. But it's really helpful to start a drawing with rough collage, because I personally tend towards being way too uptight with my drawing (unless I'm sketching in which case I'm "safe") but if I start with something rough on the page then I'm forced to be consistent with it and it all comes out much more loosely.
art fag
die bitch
"As far back as 2007, at an earlier Corner event, he asked Giffords 'How do you know words mean anything?'" You can thank the deconstructionists and postmodernists who told Loughner that words are meaningless and/or arbitrary. A classic case of an unhinged nihilist trying to will his imprint on a supposedly meaningless world. Educators in the postmodern playground take note: Wacky ideas can have consequences.
Commmme onnnnn!
Hawaii
@kpunk interesting
At times Iv´e noticed the synchronicity coming in rapid fashion. As if there is a launguage behind all daily events. At times it seems like I can almost grasp it and interpret it. Could it be the closer we arive to the center the more we become connected with like thought? That this like thought becomes an understanding of our connectedness to all things and all beings. It is almost as if we have been called through our lifetimes towards a moment. The more we look for it the more our vision with spiritual eyes starts to see. It´s like we are learning a launguage of the stars.
THat veil so thin that we see signs increasing saying it´s there. Where does this spiral lead?
Blaise, I think something you're getting at is developmental vs. direct drawing. I've only been working directly to paper for a few years now. Something about the developmental process disappoints me, it's too much a series of compromises. Also it's interesting that you mention sculpting because I've always thought of my drawing process as sculpting. Ever since life-drawing in college. I don't know if it was the professor who pointed me in the direction or if it was something I figured out on my own, but when you are doing quick life sketches you need to sculpt the image, the only things that matter are space and weight. Whenever you put a line down it suggests space and weight, if you hyper-focus on this aspect while drawing (even at the expense of other aspects) you are sculpting while drawing. I'm not saying it's better or worse, but it's just an interesting way to approach drawing. Mat Brinkman is the best sculptor/drawer in comics.
But how can you say anything when it's just words?
I never thought of sculpture as a metaphor for penciling. To me, penciling is where the "thinking" happens. That's where the world gets designed while inking is when the comic is actually built. Pencils are the architecture and inking is construction.
I don't get why in comics, it's always been so necessary to hide the history and cover up the thought process with perfect brush strokes. I learned in my fine art classes that even erase marks have to become part of the work. Then i learned the erase marks can be the most important part of the work. That was one of the reasons I liked Young Lions. There's that history, and that sense that you're peering into a world that someone else actually created through a series of possibly unsure and arbitrary decisions.
PS Why do you guys always have to be so esoteric? I have to dig through layers of weird internet references to get to the comic and art ideas I'm actually interested in here. I like the blog, I like the comics you all make, but you can be pretty intimidating and confusing.
I'm thankful that you leave comments open so sincere wanna-be artist/cartoonists like me can still comment.
in translating mediums (scanning, photocopying, etc) data disappears
but there is always something (paper, marble) where there was once data
jason was saying how he likes the 'ruthlessness' of digital deletion
the purity of the digital erasure
i think what i wanted to do in this blog post was compare the 'soft screen' of paper with the 'liquid' screen of the monitor
'An example of ['virtual'] would be the meaning, or sense, of a proposition, which is not a material aspect of that proposition (whether it be written or spoken) but is nonetheless an attribute of that proposition.'
propositions are a cheap way to enact or re-enact certain scenarios via metaphor. i still do not understand why the 'real' is preferred in culture today. why is the physical 'enactment' of a francis allys / felix gonzales torres / marina abromavic narrative better than the depiction of that narrative? is it just the aesthetics of reportage? why is it still more exciting to hear about something that 'actually happened' even if that event is completely abstract to you? is it just the 'authenticity effect' of photography or the 'news item'? i understand the hierarchy of real over virtual in terms of food, rent, etc, but why does this extend into the virtual worlds of digital and print culture? is reality simply a better narrator?
Northfield, MN:
Lakeville?
Owatonna fercrissakes?
Mille Lacs, Leech Lake, Duluth, Brainerd?
Try Gaylord. is a real place with long history and lots of character!
@sincerenoob
2 many jinx + linx?
i think kpunk explained everything more than sufficiently
:
not why?
why not.
Do they not still teach post-theory in the schools? Are the kids not anxious post-theory addicts today anymore? Has tumblr.dump/flickrgroup replaced verbal diarrhea as the desired mode? Can I stop to take a breath?
O_o /V\ o_O
[name link 4 purity + real answer to your quest + awesome Jeff Koons disses @ circa 5:00 if u think that's funny]
thinking as sculpture
word verification = imaggen
(pretty good)
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within
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Jared Loughner was a theory addict!!!! He watch Waking Life, a notorious philosophical movie. philsophy and liberalisim rott his brain
nah, Jared was a notoriously notrious big notary, no but he was a right wing conspiracy theory nut job wingnut, total tea party bagger brah, a right wing fashess!!!!!!!
a isolationist crazy bush baby.
f u Jared bro
bad theory is approaching right wing fascism the stupider it gets slouching toards bohemmy
seriously, what is it? i've never heard that word before and google is of little help.
also, c.bren?
Intro track is free, around 3:30, David Byrne on
architecture as thought
@Anahnahnahnahnomous I don't know any anxious post-theory addicts. They didn't teach that in Northfield, MN I guess. Andy Warhol is still too avant garde for us. This is the guy I took art classes from.
Also, yes, funny video. I liked the delivery. I will have to respectfully disagree with Mr. Marco Kane though. I think the clutter is pretty beautiful.
Someone should make a comic and use the comments section on Comets Comets as the dialogue. I would read that. Even though you guys still kind of scare me.
@scaredy kat
Gooseberry Falls and Taylors Falls are terrific
if you have not tried them yet, i recommend
fun for everyone from Andy Warhol to the much maligned Arneson, Wendell
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