Exercise: Drawing from History

Brief

Now choose one of the artists and spend a day making a drawing based on their artwork. Use an A3 piece of paper or card. You could work from one of your own photographs, or the view outside your window, or a photograph from a newspaper or magazine.

The important thing is that you find the image or view interesting to draw. Consider how your chosen artist draws, whether it is with a pen or brush, and the style they draw with. For instance, Hergé drew Tintin with what is known as a ‘ligne claire’ (meaning ‘clear line’) or ‘dead line’ style, where the pen’s line thickness does not get thicker or thinner, whereas Jack Kirby’s ink line varies greatly depending on what is being drawn – for example, a line delineating a leg would become thicker at the thigh part of the leg and taper to a thinner line down to the ankle.

Try to make your drawing a picture of the whole world that the characters inhabit, so draw the people, objects and a landscape or ‘background’ in your chosen artist’s style.

Research

I wanted to truly capture Herge's style so I wanted to do some research on how he approached his work.

I found a very interesting video of his entire process which I felt was important to watch and learn from since it shows his thoughts and methods of creating The Adventures of TinTin.

1 Making of- Tintin by Daniel Werneck. A brief explanation of the video above is the process of Herge is starting off with a really rough sketch then on some tracing paper he will draw the key elements of the sketch. With that, he will get another piece of paper and graphite pencil the whole panel- then transfers it onto the main A3 page.

The additional content that is shown is the process of colouring, the medium looks to be water-based medium and is done with create care. From there, it's the process of transferring, drawing and refining; after that a transparent film with the ink-work in aligned with the work.

As said in the brief Herge used clean lines in his work with the use of a pen, using he same width of pen work. So instead of my usual use of brush pen that creates a varied line width, I stuck with a 0.6 pen.

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Process

My reference was outside my living room window where there was a car, a bird and lots of trees and a path and road. I thought it would be nice to include some machinery and nature since the photo I had from the last blog post and that element too. I was unable to capture my reference since the main focus moved after I drew the sketch.

With the sketch in blue pencil, I took my 0.6 pen and when over it, I also added some herge's iconic cartoon textures, i.e flicks of grass.

Here is my work un-cropped.

Here is my work cropped

It was really fun to do this, since I usually work with a lot of details and textures. I really liked doing and I thought I'd push myself further to make my work like Herge's style and I thought to colour it.

But I thought that wasn't enough, I wanted add a person. I came up with a few ideas, Like hiding by the car or sitting at the curb-- however I thought it would play a nice homage to Herge if I did someone walking their dog. Luckily enough there was enough space and it helped lead the eye to the character, I was happy with how well the dog walker suited the environment and how to similarly reflects Herge's style.

Final Work

Side by Side

Evaluation

I really wasn't expecting like this exercise, but I surprisingly did! I wanted to chose an artist not to my style to expand my skills and be more open-minded, and I am pleasantly surprised with the result. I tried my hardest to create the same style with using the same size pen and flat colour and I feel like I was able to achieve that look.

Putting it side by side, if I was to be really nit-picky I would say to add some more lines to the car, like the shaping of the car and maybe add some textures to the trees in the far back. I am still very surprised with how similar it looks and I could say I'm happy with the results. I would also say that next time I should try the exact technique of Herge with the tracing and the use of water-based medium instead of the digital art.

The positives of this final piece was that I'm happy with the way the person and dog turned out, I was really able to capture Herge style. I also like the colours and line work of the tree on the left, it's sticking to the style of herge.

What I will take away from this exercise is that I should explore artists and explore their style to refine my own style.

1 D. Werneck, Youtube 'Making of- Tintin', 11 Sep. 2018 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ytV-RcsdKg Accessed 9 June 2022

2 U/A, Comicsflix.org 'My Perfect Comic Issue 3', 13 Mar. 2018, https://comicsflix.org/2018/03/13/my-perfect-comic-issue-3-comicsflix/ Accessed 9 June 2022

3 Tintin, Tintin.com, U/A. https://www.tintin.com/en/characters/tintin Accessed 9 June 2022