What a Circus!

I was feeling a little bit like Otto, the amateur clown, yesterday as I participated in the  OLA mass book launch! This is my pencil drawing I was doing this week for p. 75 of Hometown Otto.

I was part of CANSCAIP's mass book launch at the Ontario Librarians Conference in Toronto yesterday, promoting my book Big City Otto. 35 authors (with a smattering of illustrators) got up on a noisy little stage in the corner of a cavernous hall down at the Metro Convention Centre, and competed to have their voices heard over the noise, bustle and collective yammering of a book trade in upheaval.

The whole event left me feeling a bit bewildered. Not that I'm pointing fingers at the wonderful CANSCAIP staff and volunteers that made this event possible - it was a noble attempt to give authors a chance to try to get word out about their books. And we were all willing participants! 

But it did get me thinking about the duality of the creator's life, the making and selling of books, and how that balance seems to be sliding more and more towards the point where we have to become hucksters for our own creative output. There was a time when this was the publisher's job and I've been in the biz long enough to remember that. But as book sales dwindle and the way the word gets out around books changes on a daily basis, authors and, to a lesser extent, illustrators have had the responsibility for the success of their book fall more and more upon their own shoulders. Or perhaps shouldered it themselves out of a sense of desperation.

A lot of it centres around publishers pushing their creators to establish a presence on the web, through Facebook and Twitter, networking and connecting with fans and the industry. A great deal of time and effort goes into this communication and much of it ends up, in my opinion, to going out to a closed loop of like-minded individuals. 

Some are well up for the task of self promotion, but many are being asked to do something they are simply not hard-wired to do. Many creators, due to the introspective and solitary nature of their work, are, quite frankly, lousy at it, and shouldn't be feeling they have to do this. It is why there is a publishing industry in the first place - because it has been a long-recognized fact that the people who create books are not those best-suited to sell them. But whether publishers expect this of them or not, the people who make the books children read are being driven to wanton acts of self-promotion in a desperate bid to get their books "out there".

From a personal perspective I was struck with this odd duality that seems to be expected of us these days. The contrast between what I see as my real work - creating books - and this other odd job, selling them. Most of my days (and I'm lucky, because I still make the major amount of my dwindling income by sitting at my drawing board) involve working away, pencil in hand, in some sort of alternate universe populated by an elephant in a trench coat or — as you can see by the attached pencil drawing — a clown costume. The hours slip by as my mind inhabits a space out of time, and nothing intrudes upon this peaceful act of creation other than the need for an occasional bite to eat or cup of tea. This is my job.

And then, occasionally, it is punctuated by this frenetic attempt to let the world know about this book you have poured your heart and soul into, where the ego gets put on the line and the hard reality of learning that no one will ever care as much about your work as you do comes crashing in around your ears in a deafening cacophony of insecurity and not particularly useful self-questioning. 

In the cold hard light of day, once more sequestered in your solitary world, the question arises - how is this productive and why would you choose to identify with that part of your work? And the answer, as you pick yourself up and dust yourself off is so evident that you wonder why it need even be asked as you go back to your job. Your real job, of creating books.

Drawing with Character Part 3:

The Practical Bit continued …

2. Thumbnails

I've spoken in previous posts about the value of thumbnails but I will repeat it here. I find the thumbnail process invaluable in character development. At this stage, unburdened yet with the encumbrances of detail, one can often capture with a few quick lines a facial or body expression that can serve as a valuable reference when you come to final pencils. Don't labour over character at this point, but equally, don't move on to the next frame until the current one has captured the essence of expression that you desire.

Here is a thumbnail I did for p. 53 of Hometown Otto. You can see how I've worked out points of view, lighting and - most importantly - the faces and body language that I want to communicate in my final. The tentative approach of the hidden animals, the wacky look on the goose, the pathetic look on the calf are all sketched in at this point.

And here is the final pencil that I completed last week. A few things have changed (for instance I have added bits of junk that the animals are emerging from), but the essence of the page is very much what I had first imagined. I will constantly consult my thumbnails as I work through my final roughs, just to make sure that I don't stray too far from those initial - and I think best - impressions.
This page also contains my favourite line in the entire book,  from Giselle the Goose, recent escapee from a paté de foie gras factory- "I've got a dodgy liver thanks to those criminals!"

Drawing with Character: Part 2

The Practical Bit …

Okay, picking up from the last post, once you have taken ownership of the story, inhabited the characters fully and approached your work armoured in integrity and honesty, (whatever that means!) there are a number of very practical tools in the illustrator's paint box that can help you tell the visual story you want to tell and invest its characters with, well, character.

1. Character Sketches

Whenever I begin a story, I always spend a little time doing some character sketches for the main characters. As I work fairly impetuously, often those characters come out whole cloth. Others I work through a bit more until I've got what I want.

This is a very important process and you should spend as much time as it takes at the beginning to make sure that you are comfortable with your characters. Be sure to know them in a number of different guises - surprised, angry, sad. Even in attitudes that aren't necessarily going to be used in the story, as this will help you to more fully inhabit the character and make it three dimensional (character-wise) when it comes to working on pages.

These are my character sketches for Pedro, a panther that befriends (sort of) our two heroes in Hometown Otto.  You can see how I'm working my way through this character, ditching the first couple of head sketches and getting more of a feel for him on the third try. About this time I think I actually went and took a look at what a panther looks like, flattening the forehead and raising the snout higher on the face in sketch four. I try Pedro out in a variety of expressions, trying to capture the friendly yet self-serving and somewhat shifty character that he is (and as are all cats!) You can double click on these images if you want to see them larger.

These are some character sketches I did for Snake (an evil - or at least not so good - carny). Again, you can see me working through the character, eventually returning to something closer to where I had begun. When my editor read my manuscript for Hometown Otto she thought Snake really was a snake so that was a good point of departure for this character. I made him long and sinewy, with snake skin boots and snake tattoos. The tattoos became simplified as I developed him, realizing early on that I didn't want to have to draw anything that elaborate over a multitude of pages!

I'm not shy, as an illustrator, about reaching for archetypes when I'm creating characters. A case in point would be the other day when I was sketching up some ideas for a small town sheriff for Hometown Otto. My small town sheriff archetype would have to be Rod Steiger from “In the Heat of the Night” and as  I already was working with a bit of a spoof on the movie anyway, I went to Google's Image Search and pulled up a few pictures of Rod Steiger. These then shaped the basis for my character sketches.

Not shy of reaching for archetypes, when I needed a southern U.S. small town sheriff, Rod Steiger from The Heat of the Night, came to mind.

Drawing with Character: Part One

The Heady Bit …
I was writing up some notes for a presentation I will be making at the Packaging Your Imagination conference in Toronto on November 5 and I thought the observations around visual character development were worth repeating here. Although this particular talk is more directed to picture book illustration, much of it applies equally well to character development in graphic novels.

So here you go!

One cannot talk about character development without talking about the story in its entirety.

As an author/illustrator ownership is obviously not an issue. But as an illustrator of someone else's story, ownership is key.

You need to remember that you are a 50% partner in the relationship, and, for the duration of your work on the project, 100% owner. Only by fully embracing the story as your own can you give it the life and verve that will come from the tip of your pencil, brush or stylus.

Think of the story as your story, the book as your book. This isn't to cut the author out of the process but rather to put yourself in a mind set that will allow you to give your very best to the story. Because at the end of the day, your responsibility isn't to the author but rather to the story itself. You as illustrator are not simply a third party mediator between author and reader but a bonafide story-teller in your own right. And your story is the drawn one.

To really portray a character effectively you need to inhabit the character fully. You need to crawl right into its skin and peer out through the eye holes. This is the case whether it is a person or dog or cat or pig or whatever. You need to move beyond thinking of the character as separate to yourself, a third party entity.

This will help not only with character development but also the drama of the story. And again, the two are inextricably linked. There is an elation in inhabiting the character. As illustrators we are blessed with the opportunity to travel through our imaginations, do things we would never dare do, all from the safety of our own desk. 

Draw on your own experiences fully in the process of this possession. This will be easier with a character that is sympathetic to your own personality but in this respect we all have to be fairly versatile actors, and usually there is something within ourselves that we can dig deep and latch on to when we put pencil to paper.

It is said that when an athlete watches a film of someone doing their sport, in their mind all the same signals are being sent out as if they were actually doing the sport themselves. Or something like that.

So we have to be the athletes of the drawing board, feeling in every fibre of our being the same thing that the character in your story is feeling. And in doing that the character will emerge.

Whatever you do with your character, stay honest to the story. If your character begins to act and react at odds to the written word then you will loose credibility to your audience and do a disservice to the author. Read the story well, and in the process of inhabiting the character make sure that the character you are inhabiting is the one that the author has written.

One of the most gratifying comments I have received is when an author says that they feel as if I have crawled into their head and put their thoughts on paper. It is not of course the author's head one crawls into, but rather the story that has sprung from that author's head.

If you try to be too clever, too sophisticated or generally start drawing with other motivations then simply to tell the story, then you are in danger of taking the visual tale somewhere that does the story discredit. 

Next time: The Practical Bit!

Launched!

We had a great send off for Otto on Saturday, October1. In the company of friends, fans and relatives Otto and Crackers set sail on the Great Graphic Sea, hopefully to populate far-flung shores with multiple copies of his book (hint, hint)!
The launch, at Titles Bookstore in Peterborough, Ontario, was replete with five (count 'em!) different kinds of peanuts, free Gator Jus and comic sampler give-a-ways. I had the pleasure of reading from Big City Otto ( I blew up the pages real good!) talking a bit about the process of creating the comic and doing a bit of sketching for my loyal fans.
And what graphic novel gathering would be complete without at least one fan arriving dressed as her favourite character!

Otto fan in costume.

Doing what I do best.

How to read from a comic 101.

One of the best parts about doing a book!