Q&A: Space tools vs caveman tools

Sometimes a space tool is in the world and sometimes a caveman tool is in the world and they fall in love and have a baby called Compromise

Feb 10, 2024

I’ve been doing periodic Q&As on my Patreon. This was a question I particularly enjoyed so I thought I would answer it on the mailing list instead.

Richard Kirk asks: "Are there any 'power tools' you would like to have for your work? Or is doing as much as possible by hand an essential part of the overall look? I can imagine you could have something that could match your hand lettering and lay out speech balloons. Or something that could analyse the drawings for depth and allow you to shift your viewpoint. Or even something that could take your pencil sketch and turn it into something close to your finished product."

The essential question you are asking is, if I could remove myself somehow from the process in order to produce work faster and to some acme of perceived "correctness", how would I do that? Over the last few years I've used a lot of 3D models to speed up the process of drawing the same locations over and over again, to suggest compositional ideas, and (to be frank) to spare me having to draw cars from scratch, which takes a long time. But towards the end of last year I thought about why I was using 3D software this way, and the truth was, these were all things I didn't enjoy doing, yet doing them to the acme of correctness seemed to be a fundamental building block of how I worked.

But there is an inherent problem in this approach: I am not a perfect artist, but I like how I draw. The closer I push towards correctness, the more I take away from the idiosyncrasies that people enjoyed in my work when I was a far less practised artist. I will never be in the top drawer of technical artists. There is a relatability in slight incompetence, roughness, looseness, that gets lost when everything is in its right place. There is also great skill in balancing detail and looseness, a skill that I admire in others.

Here are the ten things I like drawing the least, in no particular order:

1. Bicycles There's only one person who likes drawing bicycles: Thorsten Hasenkamm. Meredith Gran once did a whole story about a bike race. But Meredith can do anything.

FIG 1: A Hasenkamm

2. Cars
Cars have a lot of angles. I can draw them convincingly because my father loves cars a lot and I understand why all the bits are where they are. I've done a number of comic pages set inside cars, which is harder than drawing the outside. I became obsessed with how you film the inside of a car while watching cop shows.

3. Tables and chairs
Kitchen table, diner table, lots of tables in a room (eg school classroom) - nightmarish. Lines and lines and lines, mad perspective, awful. And the page is almost inevitably a boring talky page so there are no distractions.

4. Sofas You can't imagine how many times I've had to draw characters on a sofa and it's brutal making the panel look good. Never works. There's nothing dynamic about a sofa unless it's flying through the air through a partition wall.

5. Staircases Where's the top of the stair? Where's the front of the stair? How many adjustments to foreshortening must there be, my darling? Where is MC Escher when I need him?

6. Structured hats (eg cowboy hat, bowler hat, fedora) How were Western comics a genre? I hate hats.

Lately I've begun to resent the 3D models - just a classic case of getting bored with my own work, and resenting having to painstakingly design these locations. But one event really brought this resentment into focus.

Last September I saw a talk given by Gerhard, who did the backgrounds on the classic indie comic Cerebus. He didn't have the benefit of the cheap CAD we have now, so he was mapping out exploded views of rooms (including, brilliantly, lighting maps so he could track shadows) and building paper maquettes. When he finished work on Cerebus after 20 years, he DIDN'T DRAW FOR THE NEXT 12 YEARS and when I asked him what he did during those 12 years. HE WOULDN'T TELL ME. [I capitalise here because I decided there and then that this approach - the exact one I seemed to have adopted - IS NOT GOOD FOR THE MIND.]

FIG 2: One of Gerhard's classic tossed-off comic book doodles.

For me, making art is man vs the mountain. It's a challenge and the challenge is the thing. The mountain is always going to be bigger than me. Every time I take a shortcut - usually for an expedient reason - I like the result a little less. I was all for returning to working completely traditionally this year, but an arm injury just before Christmas has made that impossible. In the era of AI art, I think greater value will be placed on the visible human hand. It's not about perfection, it's about connection. Connection frequently has nothing to do with perfection at all.

ITEM! It is almost time for my Conan comic. 21 weeks of Conan at badmachinery.com. Look at these titles. You know you can rely on me.