This is a panel from the "Prince Valiant" comic book that was available on Free Comic Book Day. It caught my eye because it's a good example of the way I like to use detail in drawing.

There's a good balance of empty areas and areas with detail, and I think the contrast makes for a pleasing drawing (contrast is always a useful method for creating a good illustration). And the artist also was very smart about where the detail was placed. Detail will always draw the eye in and encourage it to linger in an area, while the eye tends to flow through big empty areas quickly and easily. And the story content of the panel is that the pirates on the boat are looking at the town in the distance longingly because they want to plunder it, but their captain won't allow them to. So the artist wants to call attention to both the men on the ship and the town in the distance. To get the viewer to look in the right places, detail is used for the hills above the town, and for the ocean near the men on the ship. In both cases, the detail isn't exactly on the focal points, but instead, very near to them. So you don't always have to put the detail on the exact focal point. Somewhere nearby can do the job just as well.

And in the areas of the picture that the artist doesn't want you to dwell on--like the rocks in the ocean, or the hills on the right side of the composition--the artist uses detail sparingly or not at all.

I have met people that have said that they feel the more detail a drawing has, the better a drawing it is. That's certainly a valid opinion. And there are some comic book artists that tend to use detail on every area equally when they draw panels. That's a stylistic choice, and there's nothing wrong with doing that, but personally I like it when an artist controls my eye and leads it to where he wants it to go, and doesn't confuse me about what is supposed to be important and what isn't necessary to focus on. I think the best artists are storytellers that use every trick they have to help tell the story in the clearest and strongest way possible. So keep in mind that detail can help organize your drawings and attract the viewer's eye where you want it to go, and use that method to help tell the story you're trying to tell.

So I've been working on my own project outside of Disney for quite a while. In July, I will have put three years into it already. I've been thinking a bit about personal projects and what I think are important considerations to think about before undertaking one. So this is the first in a series about things to consider when planning a personal project.

Every one of us is all too familiar with the life cycle of creative endeavors; countless personal projects are started with a ton of passion and the best of intentions, but are abandoned at some point along the way and never completed. Sometimes it's simply because the passion burns out. Passion is, by its very nature, a powerful but ultimately short-lived phenomenon. Sometimes other priorities take over your life and the project doesn't seem important anymore. Sometimes time just passes and you end up with a new perspective on your project, and what seemed like a great idea a while ago just seems silly now or not worth pursuing anymore.

I can't speak for how anyone else is able to maintain their passion and stamina while working on their own personal project, but the single biggest factor that's enabled me to stick with my project is a concept that I didn't invent, and I wasn't even aware of back when I started working on my endeavor. I've heard other people talk about this idea since I began my project, and once I heard people discussing this concept, I realized that I been following this principle all along.

Basically, the concept is: Create the thing you want to exist in the world.

This is also the reason that I started this blog. Back before I started this thing, I was constantly searching for a website where someone would talk about drawing, writing, film and storyboarding...all the stuff I was passionate about. I was searching and searching for a place where someone else was wrestling with all the stuff I struggle with and talking about it. And then I just started writing stuff down, mostly in the hope that it would inspire others to start doing the same.

Anyway, my personal project was a similar story. I began working on a graphic novel three years ago, and although I didn't realize it at the time, what initially got me going on the project was the desire to create something that I really wanted to exist in the world.

Here's the backstory: I've always really, really wanted to love comic books. Comic books are stories told with visuals, which is similar to storyboarding and film, and should be right up my alley. Many of the people I work with are big comic book fans, and they're all super smart and amazing artists, so naturally I figured I was just missing something. I didn't walk into comic book stores very often, but when I did, I always really wanted to buy something. But most times I'd look and look, and in the end nothing would really catch my imagination, and I'd leave empty handed and disappointed.

So over the years, I formed a foggy idea of what I wished comic books were...but weren't. And those things--and my burning desire to want to love comic books--eventually became so strong in my mind that it drove me to start on my journey to create the thing that I wanted to exist in the world.

So ask yourself what is missing in the world that you'd desperately like to see. What kind of movie do you wish was being made these days? What kind of book do you wish you could read? What kind of music do you wish you could listen to? If you feel that way, it's certain there are others out there that feel that way too. And by hanging onto that desire to see that element out in the world, you can sustain yourself through the tough times that come along with trying to create anything that's original, fresh and inspired.

I apologize for letting so much time pass since my last post. I've been spending all my meager spare time working on my own project, as well as writing and re-writing long-winded blog posts that aren't ready to be published yet. So, in the future, inbetween these longer posts I will make an effort to create smaller posts in an effort to update things around here more often!


When I was animating at Disney long ago, after your first attempt at animating a scene, you would show your animated scenes to the Supervising Animator of whatever character you were working on. You'd give them your stack of drawings, and they would flip through the scene and put your drawings on their animation desk so they could draw over your drawings and give you some instruction while improving the scene.

When I got into Story, things were very different. Nobody draws over your sketches in story. In a story meeting or a hallway conversation, a director or another Story Artist might sometimes draw a sketch to explain an idea they have or to illustrate what they think could be better about a certain pose or expression you've drawn, but storyboarding isn't about the exact precision of the drawings as much as it's about big ideas, story structure, entertainment, staging, cutting, pacing and acting. So we almost always talk in broader terms than just what could be improved in a single sketch. And we don't go over each other's drawings, we just pitch to each other in groups and talk about what's working and what's not working and could be improved in a bigger, more general sense.

So it's interesting for me to compare the two ways of learning and improving. Thinking back to when I was first starting in Story, the biggest steps in learning I made weren't because someone showed me how to improve something, it was because of what people talked about in story sessions. After a storyboard pitch, somebody would say that they felt a sequence was missing a certain something, and sometimes it would be an element that I never would have considered putting into the sequence. It had just never occurred to me.

For example, after someone pitched an action sequence, someone would say something along the lines of, "I just feel like this sequence could have a bigger sense of scale", and suddenly you realized that the idea of "scale" wasn't a concept that you usually considered when you were boarding a sequence. But it should be. And the next time you worked on a sequence, you considered the idea of scale and all that it implies.

Storyboarding is often compared to juggling a lot of different balls or spinning a lot of different plates. There are a ton of things to consider and manage while trying to find the right way to board each sequence. And every time I'd hear what someone felt was lacking in a pitch or a story, and it was an angle I hadn't been considering before, it was like another ball got added to my list of things to juggle.

Joe Ranft did this illustration once of what it feels like to board a sequence. He used juggling as a metaphor for how a board artist needs to balance several considerations at once.




So to mix metaphors...you could also look at each of these considerations as a different "tool" for your toolbox of how to build a sequence.

So this idea of hearing different opinions and getting a peek into what other people think, and incorporating that into my mental toolbox has always been very exciting to me and seems to be a very effective way to learn.

 The good news is that you don't have to work in the Story department at a major animation studio to have this kind of experience.

I see a lot of films. I think it's important for every Story Artist to do this. The thing is, as we all know, not every movie is a masterpiece. So, yeah, I end up seeing a lot of mediocre movies. And sometimes I get almost as excited about seeing an average movie as I do about seeing a really good movie. For this, I take a certain amount of guff from people.

But the thing I get out of a movie that doesn't work is a great opportunity to identify exactly what didn't work and challenge myself to figure out how I would fix it. Don't get me wrong, I love great movies. Obviously. We all do. And we learn a lot from them. But a movie that almost works can be just as much of a learning experience because you can see which notes are played just right and which ones are sour, and how they could be better.

I find that this is another great exercise for expanding my "mental toolbox". Anytime you can look at a work of art and ask yourself what works and what doesn't work, you're teaching yourself in a really active way that sharpens your skills and will stick with you way longer than if a teacher just told you these things.

Another way I like to compare my opinions to those of others and expand my mental toolbox is by reading reviews of movies. If I like a movie, I'll read the negative reviews and figure out what faults I didn't find with the film that the critics did. If I don't like a movie, I'll read the positive reviews and try to see the other side. It's always interesting and informative.

Also, if you're interested in this method of listening to other opinions and measuring and weighing them against yours, try listening to podcasts. This is going to sound like hyperbole, but I am really amazed at how much incredible information is now at our fingertips--for free--in the form of podcasts.

There are many screenwriting and film making podcasts that I find interesting. There are also great podcasts about comic books, writing, painting...you name it. There are also podcasts for every other subject you can think of. In addition, I like general information ones that cover a different topic every podcast. It's exposed me to interesting subjects that I never would have heard about otherwise.

If you're interested in exploring the world of podcasts, they are well organized within iTunes (or within an App that sorts them), so if you're interested in a topic, it's easy to find the most popular ones on that subject. I don't want to recommend any, because--just as I like to read reviews that are contrary to my opinions--I listen to quite a few podcasts where I totally disagree with the opinions expressed within them. Sometimes I get quite passionate about how much my opinions are at odds with the ones they espouse! So I can't say there's any one podcast out there that I agree with all the time and endorse completely (and if there were, I'm not sure what the point of listening to it would be).

I find all these techniques helpful for expanding my "mental toolbox". When I hear strong opinions about certain topics, I weigh those opinions against my own. It helps me to clarify and solidify my opinions, and it helps me test whether my point of view is valid, or whether there's another perspective that I haven't considered yet.

Too often, I think artists (and people in general) like to be surrounded by opinions that are identical to theirs. I think it brings people comfort to think that they're "right" because everyone around them agrees with what they think. But I think that's a sign of insecurity. If you're truly secure in your opinions, I think you enjoy the opportunity to test your perspectives against those of other people and you welcome the chance to change and alter your opinions as you're exposed to new ideas and ways of thinking.

I've worked as a professional artist for almost 20 years, and I can sincerely say that if there's one thing that can lead an artist to stagnate and stop improving, it's becoming rigid and inflexible in your opinions and ways of working. The best artists, in my experience, are always open to new ideas and know that they still have a lot to discover and learn.

All these examples come from the same two sources as last time: "The Mighty Thor, Vol.1", artwork by John Romita Jr. and Klaus Janson, and "Jonah Hex #30", artwork by Jordi Bernet.
 
Surface Lines

Romita and Janson's work on Thor has a lot of surface lines covering every character. Surface lines, when used correctly, can add a lot of depth and form to a drawing. But they can also quickly turn into a mess if you don't use them right.

It sounds obvious, but they should never be added arbitrarily and they should always describe the form they're on. In this example they are drawn so that they wrap around the forms of the muscles. That's how surface lines are used almost all of the time.


In the page above, the large image of Thor at lower left is another example of surface lines used well. They describe both Thor's form and the lighting in the scene very effectively.

In the large horizontal panel below of Thor flying, notice how Romita and Janson use surface lines in a slightly different way. In this case, all the surface lines are drawn in the direction of his movement to accentuate and emphasize the direction that Thor is traveling in.

If, in the drawing above, the artists had drawn surface lines going the other way (that is, perpendicular to his direction of travel), it would have clashed with the feeling of speed and motion of the drawing. It would have made Thor look slower.

When surface lines don't wrap around muscles, or emphasize the direction of travel, they're usually drawn to indicate the way the light is falling. Take a look at the first panel in this Jonah Hex page by Jordi Bernet. Most of the lines are drawn in the direction that the sun's rays are falling on the figures (except for a few lines that follow the surface detail of their faces).



The only other way I can think of to use surface lines is that sometimes they are used to indicate weather (like rain or wind). In this Jonah Hex page, all the figures in the second panel are trapped in a dust storm, and all of their surface lines are drawn in the direction of the wind gusts of the storm (this example is actually from "Jonah Hex #59, artwork by Jordi Bernet).




This is a well-known drawing principle, but it bears repeating: the number of surface lines on a face can have a big effect on whether a character looks old or young. The more lines, the older the character tends to look.

Here, to keep Jane Foster looking young and beautiful, Romita uses very few lines...



...in contrast with how he draws the face of the ancient and wizened Odin.


Check out the difference in the way Romita and Janson draw Peter Parker's face and Aunt May's face and how surface lines make a difference in their perceived ages (yes, they both appeared in "The Mighty Thor").


Surface lines can be used to create depth and a sense of space as well. Here, in the right middle panel (below), Romita uses the surface lines of The Destroyer to do that very effectively. It's easy to see which parts of the figure are above us, at our eye level, and below our eye level based on how the surface lines curve.


Simple vs. Complex

One basic drawing concept that I feel never gets expressed enough is that you should always put complicated areas of a drawing next to simple areas. This creates contrast and visual interest, and is the only way to make complicated areas work. So many times I see drawings where the opposite is true: complicated areas next to complicated areas, and simple areas next to simple areas. That's just not interesting and often creates visual confusion.

Here, the flames in front of The Destroyer create empty, blank flat areas that contrast nicely with all the reflections and texture on his surface. as well as the complicated background texture and the splintered wood at his feet. This technique creates depth and visual interest, and it keeps the drawing from becoming a complicated mess where everything has an equal amount of busy texture and visual emphasis.



In the top panel of the page below, more of that idea on display: the simple flames in the foreground contrast well with all the complicated little figures in the background and create some nice depth.



A simple panel (that I cropped from the rest of the page) showing how the wrinkles and creases on the back of the delivery man contrast well with the blank areas of his outfit. Notice how all the lines wrap around his form as well.
Lastly, another variation on the theme of simple vs. complex is a method that I find helpful in creating layouts with a lot of depth.

It works really well to create a layout with layers of complicated background structures separated by layers of a simpler form, say, trees and foliage, or, in this case, smoke.


The effect of complex layers (of architecture, usually) interspersed with simpler layers (of smoke or foliage, usually) can create an effective sense of space and depth, and it's much easier to draw than, say, a complicated bunch of buildings receding back in perspective.

Lately I've been using the Comixology app on my iPad to buy and read comics.

I still like buying comics on paper too (and I want to support comic book stores), but one of the best things about the app is how easily you can take snapshots of the pages.

I took a few snapshots and thought I'd just point out some basic drawing and composition stuff that occurred to me as I was reading. None of this is really groundbreaking or mind-blowing, I suppose...but there's not much to be said about art that is. It's just the basics, reworked and reapplied in different ways, I find.

All these examples come from the series "The Mighty Thor, Vol. 1" (artwork by John Romita Jr. and Klaus Janson) and "Jonah Hex #30" (artwork by Jordi Bernet).

Drawing crowds
Crowds are always tricky. A crowd is rarely the point of a drawing; they're usually just there to provide a background. And so they need to read as a group and not a bunch of individuals, otherwise they become a distracting mess.

One way to make sure your crowds read as a unified group is to make sure they all have the same attitude. Everyone in the crowd should have the same reaction to what they're seeing, whether it's terror, admiration, awe, anger, etc. Otherwise, their expressions and attitudes become a jumble and detract from the idea that they're one group.

Another helpful trick is avoiding the temptation to color them in a realistic way...if they all have different colored skin, shirts, pants, etc. then they become a mess of patchy colored shapes. They can begin to look like a bag of Skittles and don't read as a unified group anymore.

Some examples from "The Mighty Thor" where the colorist uses color to group a number of figures together.




 You can see how, in the page below, in the bottom panel, the crowd is colored in sepia values while the main character and the girls on the sofa he's lifting are colored normally to make them the focus and make them come forward in the frame while the background crowd recedes. Even in the top panels, when there's no main character to be the focus, the crowd is handled with different values of sepia to keep them reading as a group, to minimize their importance (they're not the heroes of this story, and we won't ever see them again), and to avoid the trap of coloring each of them with different colored shirts, pants, skin, and hair, which can quickly become a mess of color.



 Same thing here. Coloring the crowd with a consistent color groups them and tells you they're not the focus of the panel. Thor becomes the main focus of the drawing because he's full color, and his colors have more contrast than anyone else's as well.



 You'd think that kind of caricatured, simplified color would look strange and have a distracting effect. But it works really well, and I don't find it distracting or strange. It feels right.

Another example: the complicated crowd is drawn with a lot of detail...but by making them all a unified color, they become a group and the main characters remain the focus of the panel, since the main characters are colored with a fuller palette (and more contrast). This helps the main characters come forward in the field while the crowds recede into the background.



Below, another similar example: in the second panel, the colorist uses different values of blue for everything in the background to minimize them and keep Thor the focus. There's a lot of detail in the background of that panel: figures, a crowd, and scenery, so the different values used really help with readability.


Another similar example: this time, the background in the second panel is drawn into distinctly separated planes; the colorist has assigned each one of them their own color, which helps create a feeling of depth without becoming distracting. If you tried to color each building a different color, it would be distracting and  the feeling of atmospheric perspective probably wouldn't be as strong. Also, the simplified way the background is colored helps our main heroes in the foreground pop nicely.





More Caricatured Color

Another caricatured use of color that you'd think would be distracting (but isn't) is from Jonah Hex #30 by Jordi Bernet (colored by Rob Schwager). In most of the panels, the foreground is painted in a warm purple and the background in sepia. The effect separates the planes from each other and provides a nice sense of depth.



Another use of that effect below: in the next to last panel, the effect is reversed...sepia for the foreground and purple for Hex who is in the background. And in the last panel, the color becomes completely caricatured: the background goes completely red to suggest the violent feel of the scene. Again, it might seem like a strange way to approach color, but it really works well.


Like most aspects of art, color seems like it needs to be complicated and a lot of work to be effective. But simplicity is often the most effective approach to color.


Shadows

Shadows can be helpful for creating variety in composition or for showing things that won't fit within the frame of the picture plane.

In this Thor example, the last panel of a character ducking into an alley is drawn in silhouette because the action can be shown clearly in silhouette, and staging it that way creates variety and interest in a pretty straightforward action. Also, the silhouette supports the feeling of the moment: in this case, ducking into an alley to hide is an act of secrecy and I feel like the choice of putting the whole thing into shadows enhances that idea.


 In this page below, in the lower left panel, Romita chooses to show Thor's feet as he lands in an alley and uses his shadow to suggest the rest of his body. Again, it's an interesting way to show what could otherwise be a straightforward and boring action. The texture of the alley wall is more interesting visually than just seeing a standard drawing of Thor coming in for a landing (which we've all seen before).

In the panel in the middle of the page below, Bernet shows Jonah Hex's gun and his shadow cast into the frame. There's no other way to show that angle and get Hex within the frame, and it's a great choice...it makes him look especially imposing to stage him that way.

More to come in Part Two.

Veteran Disney animator and storyboard artist Marc Smith has created a new interactive storybook app called "Out of the Question". It's now available for the iPad and kindle fire. Here's the link to check it out.


 It's the first in a series Marc is creating that follows multiple characters through multiple books. It looks great!

There's a good lesson to be learned from the book "Curious George Goes to the Hospital" by Margret and H.A. Rey. I remember this lesson from reading the book when I was a kid.

In the book, George swallows a puzzle piece and doesn't feel well. The Man In The Yellow Hat takes him to a hospital so they can figure out what's wrong. This is the page that I recall:


I remember being struck by the fact that the author didn't tell you explicitly that George felt scared. Instead, the author describes an action ("George held his big rubber ball tight as they walked up the hospital steps") that creates the idea in your mind that George is scared.

That is such a great lesson in how to write: give your characters actions and reactions that clue the reader (or viewer) into how they're thinking and feeling. You feel the impact of a character's emotions much more powerfully when you perceive them in your mind this way, as opposed to a character just coming out and saying, "I'm scared".

Saying "I'm scared" is also not very realistic behavior for a character. For a variety of reasons, people rarely come right out and say "I'm scared" when they're scared. That goes for every other emotion as well. Humans are very complex, and our feelings are complex too. Most of the time people aren't really cognizant of exactly what they're feeling, and why, and even if they were, they probably couldn't articulate it. Also, most people tend to hide their emotions pretty well (this is different from person to person and from culture to culture, but it's a general truth). So when a character uses dialogue to announce what emotion they're feeling in a movie or TV show, it never feels real to me and it sure isn't very satisfying. And when a character does that, I tend to think they're lying, anyway. Think about it: in your life, have you ever had a reason to tell someone else that you're feeling happy at that moment? Or sad? I haven't. I'm not sure why anyone would be interested in a running commentary of my emotions. If I'm feeling happy, I'm just going to experience that feeling....I'm not sure why I would announce it to anyone. The same goes for every other emotion.

That's why if a character in a movie ever does announce that they're happy (or sad, or whatever), I always assume that's a lie that they're telling to cover up what they're really feeling (and then I'll try to figure out what they're really feeling, and why they're lying about it).

So for those reasons, it always seems like really poor writing to me when a character says out loud what they're feeling, and what they're saying is actually the emotion that they're feeling.

When you're writing anything, getting the audience inside the head of the characters and letting the audience know what they're feeling and thinking is one of the most (if not THE most) important aspects to communicate. So, if we can't have characters tell us what they're feeling, how do we make it clear to the viewer?

Well, because humans are so good at hiding their emotions, we humans have gotten good at reading the tiny clues people show and inferring their emotions from those little hints. So, just like in the Curious George example, use your character's actions and reactions to give the audience insight into the mindset of your character as they react to the events unfolding around them.

Sometimes that means giving your character reactions that are universally obvious (like George gripping his ball tighter to show that he's afraid). Or sometimes it involves setting up that your character has a certain behavior that he does when he's feeling a specific emotion, and then when your audience sees the character do that certain behavior, they know what he's thinking or feeling (for example, in Michael Bay's "The Island", there's a set up that Ewan McGregor's character smiles in a certain way when he's lying, and that serves as a setup for a plot point later).

The point is this: what a character does in a story - the actions he or she takes, and the reactions he or she has to events in the story - should tell us about who they are and what they're feeling. Not speeches where they announce what they're feeling.

As a writer (or storyboard artist, animator, comic artist, etc.), it's imperative that you know what your character is thinking and feeling at all times and why. If you don't know these things, then you can't communicate it to the audience, and then the story just becomes a series of meaningless events. Nobody watching it will know what they're supposed to be feeling or what they're supposed to think about the story you're telling. So the first step before you can communicate those feelings to the audience is making sure that you know the emotions of your characters (and that those emotions make sense...but that's a whole other topic).

I was recently reading a comic book and I had a hard time telling the characters apart, because they all had a similar face shape, similar facial features and similar body types, and it got me thinking about face shapes.

I think sometimes when artists are first learning, they're taught to draw a generic face shape and then they stick with that shape. I also think that when people are designing characters for a "serious" story, they think they can't caricature the shape of the face too much or their drawings will start to look "cartoony" and not appropriate for the serious tone of their work.

But even in real life, there's an incredibly variation of shape within the faces of people. The University of Massachusetts has compiled a database of faces from all over the internet. It's categorized in several different ways, but to give you an idea of how big it is, here's what you get if you click on the category "first names that start with Jav through Jes".


So that database is a great resource if you're looking for face inspiration.

I think if you're working on a comic book, or animated film, or any other endeavor where you're got to design a group of characters and you want them all to have a distinctive look, you ought to make a "Bible" of what face shape each character has so they're instantly recognizable, even in a rough scribble.

I challenged myself to see how many different face shapes I could come up with in three minutes, using the same facial features for each one. Here's what I came up with:


So you can see the kind of variety you can get, even in a quick exercise like this. Once you start creating variety with the features within the face, you can see how easily each character can have a very distinctive look and would never be confused with another character.

Here's an interesting flow chart from a beauty website that's supposed to help you figure out what kind of face shape you have. Some might find it to be a helpful tool in generating faces. It incorporates jawline and hairline shape as well, which I think could be very helpful.

And here's another picture from an online article where they break the basic face shapes into these seven categories (and also talk about the best type of haircut for each):


In the comic book that inspired this post, all the men had beards, which made it even harder to tell the characters apart because all the beards looked the same. Again, I think artists can fall into the trap of thinking there's a standard beard "shape", and then they repeat that on every character. In reality, there are as many variations in shapes and types of beards as there are faces. Here's a sample of the variety you can get just by Googling "beards":





Or you could check out beards.org to see a wide variety of beard types. Again, I challenged myself to come up with beards for my face shape template in a minute. This is what I came up with:

Obviously, what is stylish in beards changes with the times. If you are working on a historical project, make sure your beard types are accurate for the period.


The whole thing about making choices of face shapes, facial features and beard shape is that it should all come from the personality of the character you're designing. Every choice you make should accentuate and enhance the personality of your character. In that regard, it's always best to base your characters on somebody that actually exists, at least as a starting point.


If you're designing a shifty, weasely type of character, you might look at actors who seem to play those type of roles (say, Steve Buscemi or Paul Giamatti, etc.) and ask what gives those actors that kind of appearance. So whatever type of character you're designing, look at actors who play those type of parts and look for ways to get that look into your character.




Even better than actors would be to base your characters on people you know. That can lead to much more original and interesting designs. So think about the people you know and what type of personality they project, and why. Getting that type of thing into your own characters is really satisfying and makes them really rich and unique.

Finally, it can be tempting to rely on color to distinguish between characters (like, say, these two characters look similar, but one has red hair and one has blond hair). You never know if your work will be seen in black and white, or reproduced without color. And then there's people who are color blind...they may have a hard time with discerning between the two characters. You never know.


So, if you're working on a comic book or an animated movie and you're creating a group of characters, I think it'd be wise to sit down and make a chart of the different character's face shapes so that you have a guide to keeping them separate from each other and distinct.

If you enjoyed Michael Cho's inking handout, here are a few more comic book resources that I've posted before (but not for a while). All of them apply not only to comic books, but storyboarding and drawing as well.

I haven't reposted this in years, but the artist Carson Van Osten created this handout years ago when he was drawing Disney Comics (I briefly worked with Carson when I did a short stint at Disney Consumer Products). I think most of it is printed in Frank and Ollie's book, "The Illusion of Life".

Carson's handout is a great primer on common mistakes made in comic book design and layout. I posted some xerox copies of it years ago and it got a bit of attention on other websites. Carson heard about it and contacted me, and eventually he sent me an original, higher res version of the whole thing, which I scanned and posted (you can see his hand-written note to me on the first page). All of his thoughts are great and have really stuck with me over the years and saved me hours of frustration.




Legendary Comic Artist Wally Wood did a piece that shows up everywhere on the web entitled "22 Panels That Always Work".

If you're wondering what "Ben Day" refers to, they were transparent sheets with dots on them that comic artists would cut and lay onto panels to create grey tones or colors.

I always cringe when I think about this last great comic resource, because it's a brutal critique of Steve Rude's work by the great Alex Toth. Apparently Rude asked Toth to critique a "Johnny Quest" story and Toth did so, writing all his notes in the margins. Toth was a legendary curmudgeon and didn't bother to hide his clear scorn of Rude's work. I don't like posting it because it takes a lot for any artist to open himself up for such criticism and I doubt Rude knew it would become so public. But it's such a great glimpse into the mind of Toth and what made his work so great that I think it has a lot of value.

I find Toth's notes to be very inspiring, despite how tough they may seem. I think about his comment "When was the last time you lifted a heavy box?" every time I draw someone lifting anything. Great stuff...I wish more artists would leave us such a great glimpse into their thinking.

I reposted these images from this forum.

There's a tumblr page that's getting some attention lately dedicated to "Lousy Book Covers." As we all know, the digital age has made it much easier for authors to publish their own books. Naturally, all of those books need a cover, and sometimes the result is a bit...underwhelming. So Nathan Shumate has dedicated a tumblr page to a sampling of them.

Now, I'm conflicted over sharing this link because we all know how hard it is to commit yourself to an artistic endeavor (like writing a book) and it always seems wrong to laugh at people who are attempting to express themselves artistically. I have a lot of admiration for anyone who is able to complete a book and publish it. To put yourself out there and open yourself up to all that criticism takes a lot of guts. And, I would assume that, being authors first and foremost, many of them have more of an interest in writing a book (and more training in that area) than in designing a cover for the finished product.

That said, it's interesting to look at the collection of covers and look for trends that lead to problematic design. And as you peruse the choices these designers have made, you begin to wonder what exactly the rules are for creating a successful cover.

I'm not sure that there are any absolute rules for designing a good cover...but for the cover of a novel to be successful (and this applies to comic book covers as well, and also for movie posters), I think it's safe to say that the most important rule is this: does it make you want to pick up the book and start reading it (or make you want to go see the movie)?

Looking at all of these "lousy" covers in one place is a good opportunity to see trends among them and formulate some theories as to what is making them less than successful, and those rules can be helpful because they apply to other areas of drawing and design as well.

What makes a cover work or not work?

So what is the measure that makes a cover successful in the first place? Well, any good cover - be it for a book, magazine, comic book, album, DVD, etc. - should, obviously, grab the viewer's attention immediately. Books are designed to be sold on shelves in bookstores (even thought that's not exactly the case anymore) and the whole point of a cover is to stand out from all the other covers that are surrounding it as the book sits on a shelf in a bookstore. So the whole concept of the cover should be attention-grabbing and interesting. Also, it should be incredibly clear, so that the viewer can tell at a glance what idea the cover is trying to communicate. Even a moment's confusion over the cover will cause the customer to give up trying to decipher it, walk away and forget all about the book. There's always another cover just inches away competing for attention and drawing them away, and they don't want to have to "work with" a cover to figure out what it's trying to communicate.

So simplicity, I think, is key. Whatever the idea behind the cover is, it should "read" in a fraction of a second. Usually, that's how long a consumer takes to decide if they're interested or not.

Less is more

Unfortunately, inexperienced designers often think that, to be a good design, a piece of art has to have A LOT of stuff jammed into the composition. Maybe this is an effort to make it seem like the book is stuffed full of a lot of story. But simplicity and focus are hallmarks of good illustration. Less is always more. And to be restrained and control your impulses to include EVERYTHING takes discipline and control.


Any good piece of art has one center of interest. Some pieces of art might have two, or even three, but only in rare cases. To get one idea across is hard enough, and once you have multiple ideas competing for emphasis, the result is usually chaos. Art depends on hierarchy to have meaning. The artist needs to tell the viewer what the most (and least) important aspects of a piece are so the viewer can make sense of the artwork and understand what the artist is trying to tell them.

How does an artist do that? A few examples...

Obviously, things like light and dark are usually great tools to give emphasis to the center of interest and sublimate unimportant areas of a composition.


The eye will always be drawn to the area with the most contrast within the composition, so always use the most contrast where you want the viewer to focus.

How you compose and arrange the objects within your composition is another important tool for telling the viewer which things are important and which are lesser in importance.



In line art, the thickness of ink lines can even be used to tell you what's important and what isn't as important.
Those are a few examples, anyway, just for an explanation of what I meant. Back to the book covers!

As I was saying, I think some designers think that a composition is good if it's full of a lot of things to look at. The problem is, of course, that that approach is a recipe for a jumbled mess. Photoshop, unfortunately, can make it too easy to put a bunch of disparate elements together.






The problem with jumbling a bunch of unrelated objects together is that humans are very sophisticated when it comes to viewing our world....we do it all day, every day and we know when something's not right. So when we see a bunch of objects that were photographed at different locations and under different lighting conditions thrown together, we sense (even if we aren't really aware of it) that something is off. And that sense of unease and general wrong-ness can be enough to make you think a book isn't going to be worth picking up.

In the last two covers above, the artist compounded the problem by using a background where the ground plane was visible. So we can clearly see that, in the first example, the three beefcake models and the naked woman don't quite appear to be convincingly standing (and lying, brrrr...) on the surface of the ice rink. In the example above, the two medieval guys don't appear to be on the same plane with each other or the background behind them. The artist is each case would have improved their chances of success if they'd used just one figure and if they'd chosen a background where the ground wasn't visible. That makes it a lot harder to judge if the perspective was fudged or not. For an example, scroll down to the bottom of this post where I've posted some other covers from bestselling books that I found on Amazon.com.

Color and Palette Choice

Another telling sign of an inexperienced designer is the use of a ton of colors in one composition. Again, Photoshop makes it too easy to use as many colors as you want, and a wide range of unrelated colors is one of the quickest ways to create a totally confusing mess. Even painters with decades of experience will avoid this trap by limiting their color palette to just a few complimentary colors, or stick with a monochromatic palette.



Again, scroll down to the covers posted at the bottom to see some book covers with very controlled, simple palettes.

Tone and Subject Matter

The cover of a book is a bit like a trailer for a movie. It has to carry a lot of weight in accurately describing the contents and tone of the book so that a potential reader can tell, at a glance, what the subject matter of the book is and what the overall tone of the book is (meaning is it funny, serious, etc).

Font choice can have a lot to do with this. Every font has a unique personality and evokes a specific feeling and tone. And font, obviously, takes up much of the valuable real estate of the front cover. So font choice should do a lot to communicate the content of the pages inside the book.

Some fonts are hard to read, and sometimes the artist doesn't help matters by not creating enough contrast between the font and the artwork behind it.


And in some cases the artist just picked a generic font, completely squandering the opportunity to create a mood or feeling that describes the book within.



 Mass Market Covers

For contrast, a quick search of fiction bestsellers on Amazon shows that most book covers tend to be very simply designed, and therefore very direct and arresting. There's a lot of contrast and a lot of bold choices.








Fantasy and Science Fiction books seem to be a little more complicated. In contrast to other genres, Sci Fi and Fantasy books seem more likely to feature a particular character on the cover. But even so, the covers of these books keep the presentation as simple and direct as possible: always just one character to focus on, with a minimum of distracting background detail. A strong bold pose that's eye catching and feels dynamic. And typically they limit themselves to a simple color scheme or are entirely monochromatic.





In any case, I hope all this makes sense and I hope you enjoy the Lousy Book Cover tumblr. And just to repeat: my intention is not to mock the work of others or feel superior by laughing at what they've done, only to learn from their mistakes.

In future posts, I'm planning on looking at movie posters and comic book covers as well, and trying to wrap my head around what seems to work (and what doesn't seem to work) in those mediums as well.

The eminent novelist Philip Roth announced that, after spending a lifetime writing, he has decided to retire. In an interview with the New York Times, he gave some interesting reasons for why he's decided to give up writing every day. Among his statements were the following excerpts:

"It's enough. I no longer feel this dedication to write what I have experienced my whole life. The idea of struggling once more with writing is unbearable to me."

"Writing is frustration — it's daily frustration, not to mention humiliation. It's just like baseball: you fail two-thirds of the time ... I can't face any more days when I write five pages and throw them away. I can't do that anymore."


I've never worked with Brad Bird, but I've heard from people who have that he's been known to say that "Story is pain".


Writing anything - or constructing any kind of story - is, inevitably, more re-writing than actual writing (and the same thing goes for storyboarding, of course). For every step forward there's always two, three, four or fifty steps backwards. Every element of a story is always in flux as you're writing: the characters constantly change to fit the story better, or as you get to understand them better, and the same goes for the settings, the events, the dialogue, and every other aspect as well.

I hope this doesn't seem like a discouraging way to start 2013...it's not meant to be.  Hopefully it's the opposite - I find it encouraging to hear that everyone goes through the same thing - even a celebrated novelist! There's no easy way through writing a story, and no shortcuts or tricks. Just a lot of doing....and re-doing and re-doing and re-doing. It's not easy. But hearing that everyone - no matter how accomplished - suffers with the same problems and struggles the same way makes me feel better. It makes me feel like I'm not doing it wrong...that's just the only way to write and create a story out of nothingness. And the same is true of storyboarding anything. To be a good storyboard artist, I think you need to be born with that innate burning desire to make things as good as they can possibly be, and a sense that things could always be improved. More than any other talent or skill - the ability to draw, or a knowledge of film making - to be a good story artist, I think one needs lots of stamina and resolve.

First off, I'd like to say that I apologize for not posting as much in 2012 as I'd like. I will sincerely try to do better in 2013. I still love writing posts, but it takes a lot of time and energy and I've definitely used much of the energy I used to put into the blog to work on my graphic novel over the past two years. Speaking of which, this post is about comic book artwork and observations from someone who is not all that familiar with the history of comic books and comic book artwork in general, so forgive my naivete when it comes to talking about this stuff. Somebody more knowledgeable can correct me where I go astray...

The use of black areas in comic books

I was never really a big reader of comic books when I was a kid. I've become more interested in them as an adult, and now that I'm working on one of my own, I'm enjoying learning a bit about comic book art and the unique aspects and challenges of the artform.

One of the most easily recognizable aspects that makes comic books unique is the way comic book artists traditionally use areas of black ink.

It seems pretty obvious how the use of black areas in composing comic book panels came about...I'm not an expert on the history of comic books, but it seems apparent that the first comic books were either printed in black and white, or with rudimentary flat color (because that's the only kind that was available with early printing technology).




Because early printing had such limitations, the first comic book artists faced certain unique challenges. Artists traditionally rely a lot on color, tone and value to give dimension, depth, drama and texture to their artwork. Working with just black and white makes achieving these things more difficult. And artwork that lacks dimension, depth, drama and texture can be pretty dull indeed! When you're trying to tell an exciting or dramatic story, those elements can come in very handy.

So it seems like the use of black areas was the only way for early comic book artists to get those things into their drawings in a way that could transfer to the printed page.

Comic book artist Michael Cho wrote a great handout a few years ago that explains the uses of black ink in traditional comic book inking very concisely and clearly.






Years ago, I discovered the Belgian artist Franquin and became a fan of his early work.


 I was excited when I found out that they were going to reproduce Franquin's artwork in black and white in a series of books called "L'Integrale." However, when I looked at the artwork reproduced without the color, I was surprised that the work didn't "read" as well as I thought it would (I apologize for the scans, the books are thick and don't squash flat on my scanner very well).


Now, don't get me wrong: I love his work and, even as line art, it retains the charm and appeal that first attracted me to his drawings. But I had always found his work very clear and easy to follow in color, and looking at the black and white versions, I found it took more time to look at the images and discern what was happening in the panels.

Here are a couple more pages, with the finished color versions for comparison:





You can see from these examples that color adds a lot of form and depth to the panels. It's very easy to distinguish objects from each other and read the backgrounds because of the great color work. In color, everything is separated and distinct.

As Michael Cho pointed out, that's one way blacks are typically utilized: to separate objects from each other for clarity. Clearly, Franquin didn't use black that way. I assume that he knew his pages would be seen in color, and so didn't feel the need to use black to separate everything. In these pages, Franquin is using black areas sparingly, mostly only to add drop shadows beneath the characters and to fill in areas of local color (by that I mean that if a character has a black shirt, Franquin colors the shirt black).

He may also have had an aesthetic reason for being so sparing with his blacks: the more black you add to an image, the more heavy and dramatic it starts to feel. So, because his Spirou comics were meant to be comedic, maybe he consciously avoided an excess of black area to keep the panels looking light and fun.

By contrast, years later, when he did a series called "Idees Noires", he used black interior lines and textures extensively on his figures and in his compositions. The whole point of the series was to portray darkly funny ideas, so the use of more black areas may have seemed like a more appropriate choice for the material. By comparing these examples with the Spirou pages above, you can see how much depth and texture black can give you and the effect it can have.






As I said, the more dramatic the tone of a story is, the more the use of black can help in giving the panels a feeling of mystery and drama. Will Eisner is still considered the master of using inky black areas in "The Spirit" to maximize that effect.


Jordi Bernet's "Torpedo" series is set during the 1930s and features gangster stories with a very film-noirish tone. The use of black is used very effectively to create a sense of mystery, drama and danger (similarly to Eisner's work on "The Spirit").





Modern printing has made it possible to use a much wider range of colors and print them in any shade and value. As a result, some modern artists seem to rely more on color (rather than the use of black ink) to separate the objects in their panels, create shadows and establish mood.

John Romita Jr.





And then again, some artists still use black in a more traditional way.

Jordi Bernet









There's no right or wrong approach. I always like to see artists use traditional methods when it works for them and abandon traditional methods when it's not the best approach for the story they're trying to tell. I think too often (and I'd say we're especially guilty of it in animation), artists follow conventions for no other reason than because we're simply following techniques that have been established by the artists that came before us. I think we should always question our techniques and ways of working and be willing to adapt and change as we discover better ways of working, and as technology offers new avenues to explore.


Here are some other pages by contemporary comic book artists to compare the use of black areas:

J. Scott Campbell







Jeff Smith
Andy Kubert


Greg Capullo




Mike Mignola

The second type of transformation that can happen in a movie is the type that doesn't happen within the main character.  In this type of metamorphosis, the main character stays consistent within the story and their actions and personality have a transformative effect on another character within the story. Or, in some cases, the main character's actions change the entire world (or, at least, the world around them).



Mary Poppins [SPOILER ALERT] is a good example of this type of character. She doesn't change, but she has a profound effect on Mr. Banks and, in doing so, improves the life of the Banks children.

Forrest Gump is also a character that doesn't change. No matter how dark, serious and complicated the world around him gets, Forrest retains his simple outlook and sense of hope, which influences the people around him and makes their lives better.

I started this series by saying that war movies don't usually involve arcs, but "Mister Roberts" is one exception. In the film, [SPOILER ALERT] Mister Roberts (Henry Fonda) doesn't change, but his bravery in standing up to his tyrannical captain (played by James Cagney) and his ultimate sacrifice to do what he feels is right have a huge transformative effect on Ensign Pulver (Jack Lemmon).

It's interesting to note that in all three of these cases where the main character is the agent of change the title of the film is their name. Some people refer to these type of movies as "traveling angel" movies (I believe Blake Snyder coined the term).

Ferris Bueller (from the movie "Ferris Bueller's Day Off", of course) is another example [SPOILER ALERT]. Ferris doesn't really change, but the day that the two of them spend together has a profound effect on Cameron, who arcs from someone who is scared of his father and intimidated by him, to someone with the guts to stand up to his father.

Sometimes, in these types of movies, the main character is bent upon obtaining a goal and they drive towards that goal with unflinching determination, even as people tell them they'll never be able to achieve their dream. Their passion and resolve inspires people around them as they try to reach their goal. At some point, the character loses their drive and passion and questions whether or not they'll ever realize their objective, and even start to think that they were fools to undertake this journey in the first place. Right at the moment that they're considering giving up, someone that they've inspired along the way comes along and re-inspires the character and gives them a renewed sense of purpose, which re-ignites their drive.

  "The Muppet Movie" follows this kind of structure, and I'm pretty sure the film "Rudy" does as well (but it's been years and years since I've seen it, so I'm not 100% sure that's correct).



One of the things I liked about working on "Tangled" [SPOILER ALERT] is that it has a bit of an unusual structure - it has both types of characters: one that undergoes a personal change, and one that changes the world. Rapunzel doesn't necessarily go through a big change -  in the end, she realizes that her life is an entire lie, but that doesn't involve an emotional change in her psyche, that's more of an external change in how she perceives the world. She's more of the kind of character that has a positive effect on the world: she transforms the people she meets along her journey, and by returning to her parents at the end, she rejuvenates the kingdom.

Flynn has more of a traditional arc: he goes from being a larcenous thief who doesn't care about anyone else to someone who changes his priorities as he falls in love with Rapunzel, and eventually realizes that she is more important to him than material possessions.


James Bond is a character who has a big effect on the world in every movie in which he appears. He's constantly saving the world from being destroyed or taken over. He doesn't really have much internal transformation, though. Clearly, his internal landscape is not what the films are about, and anyway, it would be odd to come up with a different emotional arc for him in every film. After a few films he would start to seem like a strange, overly sensitive and wishy-washy person with constantly shifting emotions. Also, it would be confusing if you watched the films out of order. His personality would be at a different point in each movie and he would seem completely erratic and inconsistent as a character.

This is why, traditionally, TV shows don't really change the characters that much either. You can't rely on viewers to watch a show from the first episode and watch every episode every week, so you can't really arc the characters, because it would be completely confusing if you miss an episode or watch the shows out of order. Traditionally,  sitcoms are trying to create enough episodes to reach syndication, where the episodes will be replayed in infinity (but not necessarily in order), so it would be really strange if the characters were constantly evolving and changing in every episode. The characters you've come to know and love wouldn't be the characters you'd fallen in love with....they'd be a different person every week! So once shows find an archetype or personality that can generate humor and connects with an audience (Bart Simpson, Kramer, etc) they'll mine that character for as long as possible. If anything, the rule seems to be that the longer a show runs, the more the characters seem to get more and more one-dimensional and become reduced to a few character traits.

When it comes to dramatic one hours shows (things like "Law and Order"), it seems like the characters are consistent every week and the "change" within the story is whatever crime that's set up and solved within that week's episode.

Even if you tried to create a series of movies or a TV show where the character had a big emotional arc every week, it would start to feel completely insincere after a while. If you can have a big emotional swing every week, how deeply seated are your emotions, anyway? In any transformation, whether it's a character changing or the entire world changing, it ought to take an enormous amount of effort to affect the metamorphosis. People don't change lightly and, as we all know, it's not easy to change the world. The most dramatic stories are the ones where a change only takes place after much struggle, effort and conflict. Change should never come easy, whether it's internal or external. Change that comes easily to characters is not very interesting, compelling or inspiring to watch.

I know it's totally obvious, but it bears repeating: the shoulders are a very important aspect of expression. They way you design and position the shoulders of your character can tell us a lot about how they're feeling or even how healthy they are.

When someone's shoulders raise up, it usually means they're stressed or scared, and when someone's shoulders slump it usually means they're tired, defeated or depressed. Big broad shoulders can make a man (or woman) look healthy and strong, while small narrow shoulders can be used to make a person look weak, or young.

Here's an interesting article on Lifehacker.com, written by FBI counterintelligence expert Joe Navarro about the shoulders and how they reflect a person's well-being and general state of mind. There's some great information in the article that relates directly to designing and animating characters and how to reflect expressions in the shoulders. Admittedly, it's pretty basic stuff, but a good reminder to always remember the shoulders when looking for ways to make your characters expressive.

These days I tend to stream a lot of free movies on Netflix and Amazon Prime, and lately I've been catching up on some war movies I've never seen before.

I like war movies, but I find many of them unsatisfying in the end. They're rarely very emotional. War movies tend to be about accomplishing a certain mission or winning a particular battle, and the characters rarely have any kind of emotional journey or personal change.

That's a different approach from most other types of movies. In general, most stories (be it novel, play or movie) involve a certain amount of transformation. Generally, this is done in one of two ways: either the main character changes in some way throughout the telling of the story, or the main character doesn't change but has a transformative effect on the world around them.

It's not required that a story meet this criteria, of course. Many people will say it's just an arbitrary rule that some screenwriter made up. But, for me personally, my favorite stories are ones in which there's some sort of change that happens. In general, I'd say that most movies that have any emotional component get this emotional rush based on changes that happen within the movie - either within the characters or within the world of the story.

I think a change within the telling of the story is important because the events of a story just feel more meaningful and have more weight if they have the ability to change a character. What's the point of a story if it doesn't have the power to change a character (or a world) in some way? If a story doesn't transform somebody or something, then what's the point of the story? If a story doesn't create a change within the telling, it's probably just a recitation of events. A recitation of events is more what you'd expect from a documentary or an informative TV special....but not from a movie.

So for this post, lets focus on the first type of arc: the type of story where the character changes over the telling of the story. This is the most common kind of transformation in stories.


John August and Craig Mazin have a podcast on screenwriting called "Scriptnotes", and in an episode called "Endings for Beginners", they have a great way of framing how this type of story works:

"At the end of the movie, the character should be able to do something that they were unable to do at the beginning."

...I'm paraphrasing because I can't remember the exact quote, but that's a great way to think of it. Check out that episode here, or download their podcast from iTunes if you're interested.

The clearest way to state it is that you show a character that is unable to do some certain thing at the beginning, and then the events of the story change the character in a way that enables them to do that certain thing at the end that they were unable to do at the beginning of their journey.

"UP" and "Finding Nemo" are two of the clearest examples of character transformation that I can think of [SPOILER ALERT].


In "Nemo", Marlin loses his family, except for one son (Nemo), who he is (understandably) over-protective of. The first part of the movie shows many different ways that Marlin is unable to "let go" of Nemo. 

Marlin's protectiveness causes him to stress out about his son's first day of school. Marlin's anxiety causes him to create a confrontation on Nemo's first day of school that ends with his son being kidnapped.

Marlin is forced to go on a journey to retrieve his son, and that trip has a cumulative effect on Marlin that changes him in a profound way. Being forced to confront all of his greatest fears shows Marlin that he can face fear and survive. Spending time with a surrogate for his son (Dory) lets Marlin work through his issues with his son. Meeting the turtle Crush and hearing Crush's philosophy about raising a child give Marlin a chance to hear a different point of view on life and parenting. And thinking that he's witnessed his son's death makes Marlin appreciate how much he loved his son and see how his fearfulness made his life empty before.

(I haven't seen the film since it came out, and I'm restating the film as best as I can remember, so forgive me if my interpretation is a little off here....but you get the point).

All the experiences that Marlin is forced to go through have a transformative effect on him, and in the climax of the film, Marlin is in the throat of a whale where he faces a choice: he can either "let go" and trust that things will work out, or stick with his old way of thinking.


In "UP" [SPOILER ALERT], the whole story is based on Carl's drive to preserve his house as a symbol of what he wanted his life to be. In the end, he literally lets his house go to achieve a goal he wouldn't have fought for in the beginning.


Another way to show the transformation of a character is to give them a goal at the beginning of the story that they're working towards - something that they think will make their life complete, or fix their life - they desperately want some goal that means everything to them. Late in the story they will get that goal, but by that point they've changed in a way that means they don't want that goal anymore. It's a hollow victory, because their priorities have changed and they want something else - some other goal that has become more meaningful to them.


My favorite example of this type of arc is "Up In The Air" [SPOILER ALERT]. George Clooney plays a businessman who is required to travel constantly to perform his job. He loves the nomadic nature of his life, staying in a different hotel every night, traveling with a minimum of baggage and never forming deep or meaningful relationships. His ultimate goal is to earn 1,000,000 frequent flyer miles.

He meets a woman and starts to have deeper feelings for her, and he begins to question the wisdom of the life he's led so far.

When he hits the 1,000,000 frequent flyer mile mark, he gets all the rewards that he's long dreamed of receiving, but he no longer really wants them. It seems like an empty and shallow achievement to him now, because of how he's changed from the beginning of the movie.

"Tangled" has this type of arc as well [SPOILER ALERT]. Flynn is desperate to get the crown back through most of the movie, but by the time he gets it back, he doesn't really want it anymore. His priorities have changed because he's fallen in love with Rapunzel and isn't interested in material things anymore.


Characters don't have to go through giant, sweeping changes for their journeys to have an emotional impact on the audience. Some films aren't built to do that, and in those type of movies it would feel false tonally if suddenly a character had a huge arc from one extreme to another. And in other films, you buy this without any hesitation.

So what are some of the problems that arise when trying to create characters that transform over the course of a story?

One pitfall is when you create characters that are too transparently "broken" at the beginning. If it's completely obvious to the audience how the character is going to change by the end of the story, then there's no surprise about where the character is going or how they're going to end up. It can be very predictable and it's not at all surprising when it actually happens. You see this a lot in films made for younger audiences.


I'll take this opportunity to name this the "Jim Carrey" effect.

Take any Jim Carrey (or Eddie Murphy) movie made for kids, and they'll be invariably playing a character that has a very obvious flaw at the beginning. Usually this takes the form of a businessman who's so focused on his high pressure job - and so focused on getting a particularly high-stakes deal done - that he doesn't spend enough time with his kids or appreciate his long-suffering wife.

We all know where this is going: by the end of the movie, he'll have told off his tyrannical boss, made up with his kids and his wife, and pledged that they're his new priority and that he'll never put work first again.

(Then, he'll be surprised to find out that the person he was trying to impress to get the business deal done was actually looking for someone with "good family values" the whole time, and that person will give Jim Carrey the deal he was working towards, based solely on how impressive Jim Carrey is at interacting with his wife and kids).

Once you've seen one of these, you pretty much spot the pattern as soon as you see the wheeling-and-dealing character in the beginning that's great at schmoozing clients and can sell anything to anyone....but doesn't make it to the Little League game or school play that he promised his kids he'd be there for. We've all seen these types of movies and a big part of why they seem so tedious is because you know exactly where it's going from the first scene.


The other problem that happens when trying to craft a character arc is when the "story math" doesn't add up. By that I mean that the steps the character goes through in the course of the story don't seem like they'd logically lead to where the character ends up.

An example of good "story math" is Marlin's transformation in "Nemo". I completely buy Marlin's transformation. I can see how everything that happens during the film changes his perceptions and leads him to see the world in a new light.

There are some films that attempt to arc characters without showing us any "story math". This is when characters transform and become the opposite of what they've been just for cheap surprise. For example, we've all seen movies where a character was cowardly during the whole movie, but then did something incredibly heroic at the end. It's surprising, but not earned. It feels false because we didn't see the moments that changed the character and transformed them into a different person.

"Raiders of the Lost Ark" is a film that I love, but it's an example of a movie where I don't totally follow the "story math" that lead to the transformation that Indy undergoes [SPOILER ALERT].


In the beginning, Brody warns Indiana Jones that the Ark is like nothing he's gone after before, and that Indy should be careful because the Ark may have incredible powers. Here's the exchange:

Brody: Well, I mean that for nearly three thousand years man has been searching for the lost ark. It's not something to be taken lightly. No one knows its secrets. It's like nothing you've ever gone after before.
Indy: (laughing) Marcus, what are you trying to do? Scare me? You sound like my mother. We've known each other for a long time. I don't believe in magic, a lot of superstitious hocus pocus. I'm going after a find of incredible historical significance, you're talking about the boogie man. Besides, you know what a cautious fellow I am. 

So Indiana Jones is clearly a man at the beginning who doesn't have any belief or faith that the Ark might have supernatural powers. But at the end of the movie, right before the Ark is opened, he tells Marion to close her eyes, because now he believes in the power of the Ark, and he knows that opening it will unleash some kind of terrible force.

I love that idea: that the course of the movie's events have changed Indy and now he believes in the supernatural. I just have to say, though, that for me, personally, I'm not totally sure what brought that change in Indy about. At what point (or points) in the story did he experience things that changed his mind and gave him a new perspective?

Again, don't get me wrong, I love the movie, but I didn't see this transformation the first time I saw the film, and it took me many viewings to even detect that there was a change in Indy at all.


Anyway, next time I'll talk a bit about the other kind of arc: the kind where a character transforms the world around them.

When I was working on the Disney film "Tarzan", Glen Keane storyboarded the sequence of Tarzan and Jane meeting for the first time and he did an amazing job of creating an emotional, entertaining and memorable sequence (as he always does).

Somebody has cut together the thumbnails he did of the sequence and posted it on youtube (see below). I would turn the sound off, though, because it doesn't match the picture (it's a Phil Collins song, and isn't really the right tone for the sequence anyway). Even without the sound, the charm of Glen's work is evident, and the sequence is bursting with personality and entertainment.



Back when I was on Tarzan, I spent some time looking at the sequence to try and learn from what Glen had done. I was really struck not only by how he invested Tarzan and Jane with so much character (it's a great example of really crawling into your characters and thinking through their actions and reactions as real living, breathing beings), but also how much he was able to create a third character by exploiting the environment of the scene. For example, Glen's drawings at the beginning make great use of layout by contrasting the massive and bulky shapes of the tree with the small shapes of prim and proper Jane (making her feel overwhelmed by the enormity of the jungle surroundings). I also love the simple but effective idea of having Jane get awkwardly stuck in the negative space between two trees, as well as the idea of having a sudden downpour drench her while she's trapped amongst the trees, unable to move forward or backward.

The reason I think these ideas are so great is not just because they're entertaining or fun, but also (and more importantly) because they all work in concert to convey the overall story point: that Jane is feeling out-of-place, lost and overwhelmed by the enormous jungle she's found herself lost in.

Looking at Glen's boards was the first time I ever remember being aware that the environment can function as another character and contribute to the entertainment and storytelling of the scene. Up until then, I had always thought of the environment as simply a backdrop for the action.

If you find yourself treating the setting of your story or scene as just a background, maybe it's time to ask yourself a few questions...for example, is there only one location where the scene could take place? Or is it a scene that could take place anywhere? As examples, a breakup scene between two married people could take place almost anywhere, whereas a scene involving a doctor performing open heart surgery can only happen in a hospital.

So, if your story involves two people breaking up, where is the best place (within your specific story) to have it happen? In the same place where they first met? In the delivery room as their first child is born? At the emergency room as one of them is dying? Is there a specific setting that will have special meaning because of what it means in your story? Is there a location that will have more emotion than anyplace else? Or is there a location that will have more entertainment than anywhere else? What's the best option for your story? What are you trying to say, and how can the environment help say it in the strongest possible way?

As far as my other example, we usually think of open heart surgery taking place in a hospital or emergency room. But there could be a lot of entertainment in seeing someone have to do this operation in the back of a taxi, or on their kitchen table, or in the middle of a snowstorm. Setting your scene in an unexpected place can add a twist to a scene that otherwise would feel familiar and tired.

I don't have an exhaustive list of examples where the setting becomes another character...but here are a couple different uses of location that add to the storytelling.

In this example from "The Third Man" (SPOILER ALERTS AHEAD), a carnival provides the setting as Joseph Cotten meets with Orson Welles, who is on the run from authorities in post-WWII Vienna. Orson Welles has been selling diluted penicillin on the black market, which has killed several people. In this scene, Cotten and Welles ride a ferris wheel to discuss matters in private. While the ferris wheel rises high in the air, Welles offers his rationale for why he feels no remorse for his actions, and the height of the ferris wheel and the perspective of the people on the ground far below allows him to illustrate how little connection he feels to his victims.



A great use of setting to illustrate the story point, and the height makes for an organic moment of jeopardy when Welles seems to be thinking of murdering Cotten. Also, the light hearted atmosphere of a carnival makes for a nice contrast to the macabre subject they're discussing (or, depending on how you feel about carnivals, you could say the typically creepy carnival atmosphere makes for a naturally disturbing place to discuss such greusome things).

The climax at the end of "The Third Man" (ANOTHER SPOILER ALERT) involves the authorities finally catching up to Orson Welles.

This is the kind of chase scene that could unfold anywhere, so the film makers decided to find an interesting and memorable place to set the action...in this case, the sewers underneath Vienna (and on sets built to look like the sewers). This gives the sequence a unique feel and makes what could have been a standard cops-and-criminal chase a distinctive and memorable finale. The use of audio, light, shadows and staging are nothing short of incredible (skip to 1:50 if you want to go right to the sewer chase).



As a last thought, some films just seem more successful than others when it comes to making their setting seem like a living, breathing place (again, like a character in and of itself). The desert in "Lawrence of Arabia" doesn't feel like just a backdrop for the action; it feels like a real obstacle to the characters, and not jsimply as a vast expanse that's a hazard to traverse. There's deadly and disorienting sandstorms to contend with, as well as quicksand that sucks people and camels to a quick and gruesome death (and probably many more things I'm forgetting, it's been a while).

"Treasure of the Sierra Madre" is another example: as the three heroes search for gold in the mountains, the environment is portrayed as foreboding and difficult to navigate, but there's the additional challenge of trying to "read" the landscape to find a suitable spot to mine. The native bandits and villagers aren't just background, either, they all play a part in the telling of the story and have their own unique personality and flavor within the story. And a sudden storm of rain and wind play a pivotal part in the outcome of the finale.

The iconic car chase scenes in the movie "Bullitt" take full advantage of their location on San Francisco streets and give the film a sense of place that could only come from that particular city. The car chases in "The French Connection" do the same thing for New York's streets and elevated train. "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" does a great job of using the Chicago setting to give the film a unique feeling and personality. John Ford famously used Monument Valley in Utah to provide a backdrop and flavor to his westerns that are unlike any other.


Those are just a couple of examples off the top of my head, and I'm sure you can think of a lot of better illustrations...but in any case, I hope the point is clear: location and setting are not an arbitrary choice and they can add a lot of meaning as well as personality and entertainment to a story. Where you set the action can help illustrate ideas that might otherwise be hard or even impossible to convey. So remember that the environment can be a character too!

More on the relationship between the head, hips and rib cage (as it applies to humans, anyway).

When you open any book on anatomy, they'll usually start with a really basic fact that's helpful in trying to make figures look either masculine or feminine: the male body usually has wider shoulders and relatively narrow hips, while female figures have wider hips than men, with comparatively narrow shoulders.


 There are a few reasons for this; women tend to have bigger hips, for one, because the female pelvis is wider than the male pelvis. This is because women, in order to give birth, have to pass a baby through their pelvic bone.

Also, women tend to store fat on their hips, thighs and rear ends, but not around their waists. Even as they develop after puberty and their hips widen, their waists stay about the same as before puberty (at least according to this wikipedia article on Female Body Shape). So females tend to have thinner waists than hips, giving them that hourglass shape.


Why do women tend to collect fat in that area? I think I've read that women's bodies do that to protect the uterus and keep it warm, which aids in growing babies...but someone correct me if I'm wrong.

The female body shape changes after menopause. As women get older, they begin retaining fat in their waist area, and eventually, abdomen (again, see the wikipedia article). I suppose this is why it always seems to me that, the older women and men get, the more the physical differences between the sexes are harder to see.



The reason that men have wider shoulders than women, as far as I know, is because the male ribcage expands during puberty to accommodate the lungs, which also expand in males during puberty. Males, being larger than females, need larger lungs to supply their bigger bodies with enough oxygen.


Unlike women who collect fat in the thighs, hips and rear end, men tend to collect fat in the stomach area.

One important thing to always remember is that, even when the body shape of a person changes due to adding muscle or gaining weight, the shape and size of the ribs and pelvis stay the same. Obviously, bones don't gain muscle or weight. So no matter how muscular or overweight a person is, the underlying skeleton remains unchanged.


So all these factors are useful when trying to draw and design male and female characters and trying to retain their feminine and masculine traits. That can be hard to do, especially as they deviate from the ideal, and as you try to make them heavier or older.

But what about the exceptions? Obviously, these "rules" aren't absolute. Like any rule, once you understand it you can break it and subvert it when it makes sense to do so.

The first exception that springs to mind is female swimmers.

Female swimmers tend to have broader shoulders and narrower (by comparison) hips.



Obviously, all female swimmers weren't magically born this way. The ribs and pelvis of a female swimmer are exactly the same size as those of their everyday counterparts (that is, women who don't swim competitively).

The reason female swimmers look the way they do is because they work out to increase the size of their shoulder muscles (so their shoulders get bigger), and they have very little body fat (since women collect fat in their hips, and a fit female swimmer has very little fat, there's none to expand the size of the hips).

Finding men with hips that are bigger than their shoulders is a bit harder, but it does happen. It's interesting how each individual body distributes weight in a different distinctive way. Some men seem to gain weight and still preserve the typically male narrow hips, so that they retain the male standard of broad shoulders and narrower hips...


...and some don't. Sometimes you do see men who have wider hips than shoulders. Milt Kahl used this concept for Mr. Snoops in "The Rescuers", and, in that particular case, it lends a soft, bumbling, ineffective feel to the design that fits his personality.

But that's not the only way to use that idea.

Anyway, this isn't meant to be an exhaustive look at how many variations there are to male and female body types - the possibilities are endless. Look around and see how many you can find.

The point is, use the standards of what we expect from the male and female body and stick to the ideals when it helps you. Play against the expected body types when that helps you, as well. Once you know why our bodies look the way they do, you can change around anatomy to your heart's content to achieve whatever effect you want to achieve.

When you're designing your characters, always think about who that character is and what type of personality they have, and how you can reflect that personality in the body that you give them.

I know I've already talked a bit about this topic, but I recently saw Wes Anderson's "Moonrise Kingdom" and it inspired me to revisit the subject. It's a film with very deliberate staging choices, which has a huge impact on the mood and emotional experience of watching the movie.

In this previous post, I talked about how flat staging creates a different feeling than staging in depth. By "flat staging", I mean whenever the camera is placed so that the action is either perpendicular or parallel to the camera and where the characters are usually seen straight on or in profile. Basically, flat staging is what it sounds like: staging the action so that, to the viewer, everything looks flat and has very little depth.

Flat staging works best when trying to create a humorous mood. Many comedies use this (as do dramatic movies when trying to have a lighter moment). In animation, some of the most funny shorts tend to favor this kind of staging to maximize their comedic mood...



"Winnie the Pooh" is another good example. "Winnie the Pooh" is pretty much all staged flatly, but also in a "diorama" like way. What I mean by that is that there are few close ups or dramatic angles in "Winnie the Pooh". Everything is staged in medium shots,  where the action happens in the middle distance away from the viewer. You always feel slightly set back and separated from the action.


"Winnie the Pooh" doesn't have a lot of closeups, and there are no upshots, or downshots, or scenes that look inherently dramatic.

This affects your whole emotional experience while you're watching the film, because staging and camera placement have a huge impact in how we feel while we watch a film. Where the camera is placed (as well as how the scene is lit and how color is used) tell us how to feel about what we're seeing. It's impossible to separate how a scene is staged from how to feel about it.

"Moonrise Kingdom" has probably the most specific and deliberate staging choices of any movie I've ever seen. Wes Anderson chose to stage his film in a way that's a lot like "Winnie the Pooh" - every scene in the film is staged in a very flat way (many of his films have this kind of staging, of course). In every scene, if a character moves, they move either parallel to the camera or directly towards the camera. There's very little depth in almost any shot and many scenes are symmetrical in their design. The best way I can describe it is to say that watching the film feels like looking at the illustrations in a children's book.







This has a huge impact on the mood of the film and how the viewer feels while watching the story unfold. It has a very whimsical feel that gives the film a quirky and charming sensibility. That type of staging is a perfect match for the writing, which is very quirky and charming. So it seems like the perfect marriage - the way the film is shot complements the intention of the script and the feel of the characters in the movie.

That's our goal as storyboard artists; to storyboard in a way that uses every tool at our disposal to tell the story in the best way possible.

The interesting thing about this type of staging is that, as you'd expect, the emotional range of the film is rather contained. Because the whole film is shot in this flat and whimsical way, the film never goes to an extremely dramatic or emotional place...it stays in the quirky, charming and "small" world that it starts out in.

I'm not criticizing that choice - it was clearly the film maker's intention. The film is a period piece and is meant to stay contained in the charming world that it's set in. An intense dramatic scene would feel as false and out of place in "Moonrise Kingdom" as it would in "Winnie the Pooh" or in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

By contrast, films like "Tangled" or "Brave" have stories that go to a very emotional and dramatic place. If either of those films stuck to flat staging the entire time, I think it would feel very unsatisfying and frustrating to the viewer  - like the film makers weren't committing to the full emotional range of the story they're trying to tell.





Again, most films have a range of both types of staging....flat when they're trying to be humorous, and deep when they're trying to be exciting, emotional, scary or dramatic.




So the next time you're watching a movie or a TV show, be conscious of how the action is staged and why. Along with the color choices used, and the type of music in the soundtrack, staging is one of the most important tools we have to create the emotional response we want from our audience.

Drawing convincing clothing and folds can add a lot of realism and believability to a drawing. Like a lot of things, when an artist draws them well you don't even notice them; you only notice when they're drawn poorly.

The Famous Artists Course that I own has a great chapter on drawing folds. Here it is, in its entirety (again).


Even if you're not drawing men wearing shirts and jackets, or women wearing skirts, the same principles apply.

Last week, it seemed that the Los Angeles Kings were about to sweep the New Jersey Devils in the Stanley Cup Finals (the American version of hockey championships) in four straight wins.

I asked a Kings fan if he was disappointed that it went so quickly and easily for the Kings. He said no, that it was his dream to see the Kings sweep the Devils (they didn't, and then the Devils won two in a row before the Kings finally got their final win Monday night).

The idea of a sweep reminded me of a chapter in David Mamet's book "Three Uses of the Knife". It's a book about drama and dramatic structure, and in the chapter "The Perfect Ball Game", he describes what all sports fans really want when they watch a game: to see their team win, but in a way that follows dramatic form (at least I always did when watching sports). We want the game to match the structure that a good movie has.

It shows that, somewhere deep down within all of us, there is some innate need for drama and stories. We seem to be wired to see all the things that happen to us - whether it be in our personal lives, or at work, or even is sports that we watch - as dramas that unfold with structure and meaning. I suppose it's how we make sense of all the (seemingly) random things that happen to us all the time, and how we find order in all of it.

If nothing else the chapter is a good primer on how the three act dramatic structure works.

Here is the chapter, in its entirety, and verbatim (all the interesting capitalization is his):


THE PERFECT BALL GAME

What do we wish for in the perfect game?

Do we wish for Our Team to take the field and thrash the opposition from the First Moment, rolling up a walkover score at the final gun?

No. We wish for a closely fought match that contains many satisfying reversals, but which can be seen, retroactively, to have always tended toward a satisfying and inevitable conclusion.

We wish, in effect, for a three-act structure.

In Act One Our Team takes the field and, indeed, prevails over their opponents, and we, its partisans, feel pride. But before that pride can mature into arrogance this new thing occurs: Our Team makes an error, the other side is inspired and pushes forth with previously unsuspected strength and imagination. Our Team weakens and retreats.

In Act Two of this perfect game Our Team, shaken and confused, forgets the rudiments of cohesion and strategy and address that made them strong. They fall deeper and deeper into the slough of despond. All contrary efforts seem for naught; and just when we think the tide may have turned back their way, a penalty or adverse decision is rendered, nullifying their gains. What could be worse?

But wait: Just When All Seems Irremediably Lost, help comes (Act Three) from an unexpected quarter. A player previously believed second-rate emerges with a block, a run, a throw, that offers a glimmer (a glimmer, mind) of the possibility of victory.

Yes, only a glimmer, but it is sufficient to rouse the team to something approaching its best efforts. And the team, indeed, rallies. Our Team brings the score back even and, mirabile dictu, makes That Play that would have put them ahead.

ONLY TO HAVE IT CALLED BACK, yet again, by fate, or by its lieutenant, a wrongheaded, ignorant, or malicious official.

But see: the Lessons of the Second Act were not lost on Our Team (we, caught up in the drama of that moment, did not recognize at the time that the second act had lessons. We watched and understood it as a series of both random and unfortunate happenings. In retrospect we intuit/perceive its operation as part of a whole - i.e., we perceive it as part of a drama). This or that one might say it is too late, the clock is too far run down, our heroes are Too Tired, yet they rouse themselves for One Last Effort, One Last Try. And do they prevail? Do they triumph, with scant seconds left on the clock?

They all but triumph. As, in the final seconds of the play, the outcome rests on The Lone Warrior, that hero, that champion, that person upon whom, in the Final Moment, all our hopes devolve, that final play, run, pass, penalty kick - Yes.

But wait: that Warrior we would have chosen for the task, that Champion is injured. No one is left on the bench, save a neophyte, et cetera, et cetera.

In which conceit do we see that not only does the game recapitulate the drama, but each act of the game (the Perfect Game, mind you) recapitulates the game (following the paradigm: "Yes! No! But wait..."), just as each act of the play recapitulates the whole. The ball game, then, is perhaps a model of Eisenstein's Theory of Montage: the idea of SHOT A is synthesized with the idea of SHOT B to give us a third idea, which third idea is the irreducible building block upon which the play will be constructed.

The Defense of Team A and the Offense of Team B are synthesized in THE PLAY, the one play, after which the ball will be found at a different position. And to that new position (a ball in the same position but at a later time is, of course, still in a new position) we, the audience, internalize/intuit/create/assign a philosophical meaning.

For we rationalize, objectify and personalize the process of the game exactly as we do that of a play, a drama. For, finally, it is a drama, with meaning for our lives. Why else would we watch it?

It is enjoyable, like music, like politics, and like theater, because it exercises, it flatters, and it informs our capacity for rational synthesis - our ability to learn a lesson, which is our survival mechanism.

This Play, which May or not Take Place, but which we perceive (we can find a similar satisfaction, for example, if we're feeling philosophical, in the interplay of clouds) because we must, because it is our nature, can, at one end of its operation, makes us better, make the world better, perhaps, because of what we have perceived. At the other end of its operation, it can soothe (or, for that matter, enrage and debauch)simply by exciting our capacity for synthesis - as the lovely kitten playing with the ball of string is happy because she practices torture, as patriotic groups are similarly happy because they rehearse - in however embryonic a form - war.

It is difficult, finally, not to see our lives as a play with ourselves the hero - and that struggle is the great task of religion, of which drama used to be a part before the Fall.