Before graphic novels there were comics...

George Herriman's Stumble Inn, 1922

 Here's a panel by George Herriman--best known for Krazy Kat--from a newspaper comic strip in the 1920s. It features several essential elements of comic drawing:

• The use of line and perspective to establish the illusion of three dimensions on a flat paper plane (the angle of the staircase, the background receding)
• The use of cross-hatching to indicate shadow and three-dimensionality (look at the ball on the newel-post, and Mr. Owl-Eye's belly).
• The exaggerated postures of the two human figures--the house detective's back is arched back at a jaunty but anatomically impossible angle, his eyes are nearly closed as he sings. Could he be less attentive? And his observer is slouched, at his ease, with a sarcastic smile. One narrow body is comically stretched, and the other broad body is comically contracted.
• The use of graphic symbols, part of a familiar visual vocabulary, that the viewer/reader tacitly recognizes: note the little clouds behind the house detective's shoes, indicating motion (or dust, or both).
• Two sorts of verbal balloons: the cloud-like balloon of song, to the left (but the singer is undoubtedly out of tune, as the twisted musical notes suggest), and the standard speech balloon to the right.
• The faces of the two characters are rendered with a few strokes of the pen: noses that exist primarily to house moustaches, strangely-shaped heads, eyes that are little more than focused (or unfocused) dots--and the extremities, the hands and feet, are disproportionately large.

Herriman's drawing above, though the work of a comic genius, is not unique. In each of the elements listed above, the drawing resembles the work of many excellent comic artists of his day, especially in the way they adapted line-drawing to the printing technology of the era--perfect for newspapers.

We will return to these each of these elements in future postings.

Two Dimensions Into Three

It seems pretty obvious that the surfaces on which visual artists create their images--canvas, walls, or paper--are flat. Two-dimensional. The trick is to create the illusion of depth. There are basically two ways of achieving this illusion: modeling and perspective

Modeling is a general term for any technique in the visual arts that produces an effect of three-dimensional solidity. In drawing and painting, this is most often achieved with variations of tone and hue. In this still-life by Chardin, you can see how gradations of pigment (from light to dark) create the effect of roundness and depth.

The technical and financial limitations of color printing have (until recently) limited the use of modeling in graphic novels, which most often use color in discrete fields or as tonal layers.

Shadow and depth can also be suggested with lines and cross-hatching, sometimes with deliberately vigorous funky lines, as in R. Crumb's work:

or with very finely gradated lines, as in the exacting detail of Karl Stevens's work:

Karl Stevens, May 2009

We'll return to techniques of line and shadow effects later.

Perspective is "the art of drawing solid objects on a plane surface so as to give the same impression of relative position, size, or distance, as the actual objects do when viewed from a particular point" (Oxford English Dictionary).

The most common form in comics and graphic novels is one-point perspective, with a single vanishing point. Here's a panel from the great French bande dessinée artist, Jacques Tardi.

Tardi, Like A Sniper Lining Up His Shot

 

 

 

I have taken the liberty of adding red perspective lines to show how this street scene moves perfectly to the vanishing point.

Drawings of architectural details using the vanishing point always work in the same way, and always create the illusion of depth, as in this sixteenth-century engraving:

Hieronymus Rõdler, 1531

There's an almost limitless variety of things that can be done with perspective. Here's an especially cogent image (aboard a school bus) from Nate Powell's Swallow Me Whole (visit his website!)

 

Just to remind you how it's done, here is an instructive example from Yves Messer's excellent blog, My Art Secrets. Note how the vanishing point lies on the flat horizon--it must be a picture of the prairies.

For a refresher course in perspective, see Yves Messer's blog "Principles of Perspective."

For more on perspective, see the Museum of Science's "Exploring Linear Perspective, The Encyclopedia of Fine Art's page on Linear Perspective, Studio Chalkboard's "Introduction to Linear Perspective," among many other fine resources.