#189 - Being Shunned From An Industry Can Be A Blessing In Disguise

Nowadays, many comic creators aspire to work for ‘The Big Two,’ one of the big two comic publishers, Marvel or DC, drawing or writing for them. They are considered the best-paying option, and many want to work there. It is a competitive field where you, as a creator, need to be able to draw better than the other artist, write better than the other writer, and be prolific.

It wasn’t always that way.

Long ago, there was a golden age of illustration. Illustrators could make a lot of money by creating magazine illustrations or comic strips for newspapers. That was a competitive field where you could make much money, so many artists wanted to work there.

A few adequately trained artists were kept out of that industry for reasons. They tried making (superhero) comics, something no one was doing because no one thought it was something that could become a success. This was before anyone else had ever made a comic.

It was a huge success, and the rest is history. Now, many people try to break into comics. But there was a time when comics didn’t exist, and artists thought they weren’t a viable commercial option.

This is just one example, but there are many where people who could not break into a regular industry found huge unconventional success outside of these fields using those same skills.

Try to break into industries you want to work in. But if you find reasons you can not break in and are adequately trained, you might get lucky and stumble into a lucrative new field no one else has found yet.

This Week

I updated the Simplified Torso model. It now has a proper (simplified) chest and hip, and they are connected through a proper spine. I will add legs and arms and such later, but it’s already useful in this state: take the torso, draw it, and turn it into a pose, adding arms, heads, and legs yourself.

If you click on the dice icon, the pose of the torso—the position and orientation of the chest and hip relative to each other—changes.

Also, the connection points on the shoulder for the arms change, which significantly impacts the pose.

Try this: Move your shoulders around as you move your arms, and notice how much it influences your pose. Then look at the stiff manikins on the market—they do not have shoulder movement. Also, I think 3D models never consider it.

The sizes of the chest and hips adjust a little, too, to accommodate different body types.

In the future, I could make a separate model and add the head, arms, and legs and create a database of real poses approximated with this manikin model.

Anyway, for now, it is a torso model, and you can do cool, fun imagined gesture pose studies with it.

Drawing More

I expanded considerably on the drawing resources on Practice Drawing This over the past few weeks, and I was losing sight of why I was doing this again; to draw a lot myself. Not to make videos, not to make 3D models, not to record podcasts, not to create social media posts. Yet, these things tend to have a habit of distracting you away from the thing you want to be doing.

If I look at the artists I admire—I’m talking about artists like Kim Jing Gi, Katsuya Terada, Karl Kopinski, Sergio Aragones, Nicolas Nemiri, Alexander Stanton (wouwouandthewormling), which reminds me, I should introduce you guys to my heroes—they all 1) draw directly with a pen, 2) draw all obsessively, compulsively, all day every day, like an addict, on any white surface that comes anywhere near them. Put a white sneaker in front of them, and they draw on it.

They don’t do all that other stuff I do. They just draw and draw and draw and draw. And because of that, they become better and better at drawing.

So, I started having fun in my private sketchbook again this week. I used a pen and sketchbook and drew for fun a lot, with no hard practice.

I am sharing a few pages here. I want to do more of that in the coming period.

I also have returned to doing my own art flashcards again and have a ton of fun doing them. I will try to post sketchbook pages soon. I found I wanted to tweak the timing between the scheduling of flashcards a bit so that I got a wider variety of reference images to draw.

Next week, the newsletter will have a review on James Gurney’s newly-republished book The Artist's Guide to SKETCHING.