n i j o m u

March 10, 2010

the Zebra G pen and How to Pen & Ink

I tried out the Nikko G pen nib awhile ago, but found it to be a little too stiff and broad for my tastes. People commented there and on my previous nibs post that the best G pen nib was the Zebra G pen. Thanks to Joshua Dodge mentioning that Zebra G nibs were often sold under the title IC Comic, I was able to order some through Akadot Retail.

The Zebra G is much nicer than the Nikko G. For one, it produces a much finer line. It is also capable of producing bigger swells. So it has a greater range overall. This coupled with the fact that it’s a very strong nib makes me see why it’s the nib of choice for many manga artists (the fact that they can buy it locally in Japan helps, too). The solidness of the nib, besides meaning it holds up for longer, means it’s a bit stiff. That stiffness means though that you can produce very consistent lines. Some artists love that level of control. So this nib is the opposite of the Hunt 100, which is incredibly responsive, giving the lines character while sacrificing consistency.

While the Zebra G nib is really nice and I want to spend more time playing around with it, I still prefer the Brause 511. This is all a matter of personal taste of course, but when I switch back from the Zebra G to the Brause 511 I immediately notice how much smoother the 511 is to draw with. It glides along the paper with hardly a sound. I just love the feel of that.

In my order of the Zebra G nibs, I also got How to Pen & Ink: the Manga Start-Up Guide. Now, I usually avoid manga how-to books. They tend to be about aping a drawing style that I have no interest in. How to Pen & Ink is different; while it does push for a “professional” manga style, the book is about technique, how to handle a pen. However, the book is strangely laid out. The design of it is too busy for my tastes. But once you get past that, it has a lot of good and very practical advice.

For instance, the second part of the book, entitled “Step 1: I Want to Draw Manga!”, emphasizes keeping a sketch book and thinking with drawings. The fact that this whole chapter is drawn in a simple line style makes the creation of comics seem less intimidating. The third section, or “Step 2″, is one of the most useful parts of the book and is what sets it apart from most pen and ink books. This section is organized around questions and answers and the questions are ones that many of us have had, especially when we were first starting out, like “what ink should I use?” and “how do I vary the faces of my characters?” This section even discusses burning nibs, which I brought up in an earlier post (the book says it’s a matter of preference).

The fourth part of the book, or “Step 3,” is the section about how to handle a pen. There is a lot of practical advice here and it’s broken down into a four week course, so the reader can try out one thing a day. While the advice in this section is nothing new–one can get similar instruction from older books, such as Guptill’s Rendering in Pen and Ink–the writing style and pictures are probably more accessible to aspiring artists, especially fans of manga.

So this is a great book. Keep in mind, that these tips and lessons are not set in stone. A pen and ink artist does not have to cross hatch like a machine, as this book implies. A true artist should take the tips here as suggestions and things to try out. While more practical than How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way, this book teaches a certain style like that book does. So keep in mind that it doesn’t teach the way to do things, but a way to do things. If you want a book that’s more about how to be creative with pen and ink, I strongly suggest The Pen & Ink Book by Jos. A. Smith.

And I just wanted to mention quickly that the first section of How To Pen & Ink showcases three manga artists. You get to see pictures of these artists drawing- though just their hands. What struck me is how they all hold their pens really low. One of them, Nightow Yasuhiro, even seems to have one of his fingers on the nib while he draws. Doesn’t his hand cramp up?

Vom Marlowe reviews the book here with some sample pages.

March 7, 2010

duotone Carnivale page 74

March 6, 2010

bean heads

I was looking at a short story by Javier Olivares, “La Canción de María Mortecina” from Nosotros Somos Los Muertos #5, as inspriration for these drawings.

March 1, 2010

thoughts on the Dylan Horrocks interview

Rina and Thien have an interview with Dylan Horrocks at The Comix Claptrap, if you haven’t heard. Their interviews are often meandering and long, but the informal nature of them can sometimes elicit some very personal and insightful comments from the people being interviewed. This is especially true of the Horrocks interview.

I want to highlight a few quotations that I find particularly interesting.

Around forty minutes into the podcast, Horrocks discusses his experience writing comics like Batgirl for DC. He talks about how the stories often felt personally dishonest, because they represented ideals that he felt morally opposed to. But then he broadens this idea of dishonesty and at 44:08 he says: “In a very deep, personal way it made realize that stories and art really can lie. There is a sense in which all fiction is a lie, because it’s just made-up realities. But I think they can be very deep lies.” He clarifies this later: “I have friends who are writers who are still kind of starry eyed about books and stories and they think stories are wonderful and it’s how we find meaning in our lives and everything. But there’s a big part of me now that feels that stories can be really dangerous, too. And they can give us a very false idea of how the world works and how we work. We use stories to lie to ourselves as well as to make sense of things.”

This last sentence states something that I’ve been thinking about recently, about how stories often serve to reinforce cultural assumptions. I was thinking of this in terms of gender, but also in terms of environmentalism. Avatar makes us believe we actually care about rain forests and environmental degradation while we drive to see it into our SUVS and go buy Happymeals afterwards. Art as entertainment can just reinforce our smugness. Obviously, this gets even worse when art reinforces cultural biases about ethnicity and class. But usually it reinforces our beliefs about nationalism. The history of colonialism is full of examples of works of art that were used either as a justification for colonialism or to reinforce the biases about national superiority which make colonialism possible.

But Horrocks also mentions the effects on the artist. Genre makes requirements of plot. The idea that any work of art is part of a genre is incorrect, because not all stories rely on preset plot devices. True genre does. For instance, classical comedies end in a wedding; classical tragedies end with the main character dieing. Sure, Shakespeare was able to use genre to talk about actual truths, but he’s an exception. That’s part of what makes him special. True genre forces the artist to manipulate characters in only certain ways. There are certain types of conflicts that are required. Even the requirement for conflict at all is a requirement. And so an artist is taught to think in a certain path. To deviate from the path is to defy genre and so create a bad piece of work. And so the artist can be trapped into seeing things in a certain way. To offer some examples, look at what Joe Kubert did when he tried to tell a realistic story in Fax From Sarajevo. He told it like a Sgt. Rock story. And Eisner’s later work was plagued by the exaggerated poses that he had earlier used in The Spirit. And artist can get caught, both ideologically and formally.

Back to Horrocks, he mentions several times about how dissatisfied he became with his drawing. Looking at Edmond Baudoin, Blutch, and Craig Thompson drove him to believe that he couldn’t draw. Then at 1:38:06 he states: “I think what I realized in the end is that I can’t draw like them. Actually they can’t draw like me, either. Everyone has their own way of drawing and it’s as personal as handwriting. And I also realized that drawing is not something that goes directly from my brain to the paper. It’s actually more like a collaboration between my brain, and my hand, and the pen, and the paper. And all those parts of the process will contribute something to it. And it means that if I’m trying to just transfer what’s in my brain to the paper I’ll always fail, but if I just embrace that and hope that at the end of the process I’ve produced something that’s interesting to me, then I’m happy.” And later adds: “I’ve now embraced the idea that that process is what gives the work a life of its own.”

I really think that what he says is true. A drawing is not simply an inner vision made real. There is an initial vision, but as soon as you make marks on the paper, you start responding to those marks. The feel of the pen on the paper also influences the kind of marks you make. So it’s a process, a collaboration. I think this is a really insightful and helpful way to look at drawing.

Not that it saves me from hating the way I draw every now and again.

February 28, 2010