Talking Shop about Moebius: #1, I Ink Therefore I am
For now I’ll focus on his Airtight Garage, a scorched-earth masterpiece in which he rang through almost all the changes of pen and brush, a bravura performance which utterly blew this inkster’s mind when he first saw it in Heavy Metal in the 70s. We could sum up The Airtight Garage as a comix version of the Goldberg Variations, a series of constrained deviations to delight both connoisseur and professional.
Good
inking is a performance, frozen in time by the medium of
mass-reproduction, and like all performances, it follows rules, overt or
otherwise. The Airtight Garage has 3 basic rules:
2. All artwork will be camera-ready,
ie., cleanly inked with no excessive wasted work when reduced
(dropped-out or filled-in line-work), no shadows, sloppy pro-whiting,
left-over penciling, etc.
3. The final results will be attractive to the viewer.
The
last rule is crucial, it is the Prime Directive of the commercial
illustrator. In fact, all 3 of these rules are commercial in nature but
that’s beside the point for now. What matters is what Moebius added to
these rules, employing different constraints upon different pages with
results reminiscent of the salad days of Oulipo.
Let’s start with a great page from the AG: number 36. What are the rules of this page?
4. no brush work, only pen
and furthermore, at least one pen was a nicely flexible nib (using
different nibs on the same page is a double-plus-good inking practice …
although using only one nib can also serve as a good constraint).
5. minimal crosshatching, almost entirely hatching
6. a high-keyed lighting scheme,
ie., inking mostly in the 0-40% zone of the greyscale, with only a
minimum of shadows and spotting. This tonal scheme is one of the
hallmarks of The Airtight Garage;
Moebius loved the contrast of delicate tonalities spotted with a few
judicious dark passages and it gave his inking a solarized feel, an
American southwest desert lighting scheme which contrasts deliciously
with the French sensibilities of the (minimal) plot. We should also note
that, all theorizing aside, high-key inking is often faster to execute.
The
first tier sets the tone of the page. The loose hatching on the backs
of both the man and the woman semi-serves as a contour function, roughly
indicating volume. There's a minimal crosshatching, normal to the long
lines and probably done wet on wet. The man’s hatching lines are
drifting too far apart to integrate with the white. They are functioning
on their own, tending more towards pattern/calligraphy instead of
tone/local texture.
There is a ratio between
the thickness of an inked line and the thickness of the adjacent white
line (2) that when done properly creates an effect I call “petillance”, a
sort of optical sparkle similar to the chromatic analogue of simultaneous contrast.
The effect works with both hatching & crosshatching but because
Moebius kept the AG mostly high-keyed, we see little of it. Petillance
works with any line width but rarely below a 40% over-all tone. The
amount of reduction also effects it and that should be taken into
account when using it.
The
Beardsley drawing shown here is a classic example of petillance (a bit
dark though, which is not a requisite of the technique) and Beardsley
would have been aware of it thanks to the commercial wood-engraving
techniques that had become obsolete in his own lifetime.
In page 36 of The Airtight Garage,
the girl’s hair in tiers 1 and 2 has nice passages of petillance in
them, which is why they look so satisfyingly rich and crisp to the eye.
In addition, unlike the man's back, the girl's hatching in tier one is
mostly petillant, owing to the tighter spacing in proportion to line
width (or vice versa, the white lines are sized in a better proportion
to the black lines).
The backs of the
figures in tier 1 have locked in the general inking feel of the page.
Moebius had a penchant for letting his lines shed their tonal and
volumetric function and work in a more calligraphic, patterned manner,
weaving them in and out of more tonal hatching/crosshatching. This
calligraphic business creates a powerful rhythm on the page and it
requires a flexible nib, really good hot-plate paper and most of all, a
steady, confident hand moving quickly.
In
fact, one could classify all pen work by the velocity of the hand
moving the nib. Faster means more swell and taper, more energy and also,
more reliance on draftsmanship. Slow is the speed of a more classical
and conservative crosshatcher who focuses on rendering volume, shade and
texture and eschews the bravura of calligraphy.
Which leads us to the starting rule of this particular page, or at least of the first two tiers:
7. Make lots of optically long lines.
There’s
a bit of dashing and dotting here and there and a soupçon of
crosshatching but on the whole, the lines in the first two tiers are
long and draw attention to themselves, especially by avoiding
petillance. Long lines require either slowing down to make them
seamless, or, as Moebius loved to do, butting medium long, mono-width,
unswelled lines end to end. The hatching in the very first panel shows
this butting nicely. It avoids using crosshatching to create the darks
and goes straight into a solid spotting. This butting together of
shorter lines was a basic move of Moebius’ crosshatching (and most
French crosshatching of the time) and when done as crosshatching, it
means simultaneously advancing & rotating nib and hand in an orbit
around the axis of the implicit spherical volume.
The hair passages in tiers 1 and 2 are not only petillant but also governed by lines of beauty.
Note that in the uppermost left-hand corner of the 2nd tier, the man's
hair drifts so far apart that the lines tend to cease cooperating with
the white, although their natural tendency to revert to purely
calligraphic lines is subverted by a loss of curve and swell (3) in
certain spots. The lagging of this passage is confirmed by the slight
shakiness of the lines; my suspicion is that Moebius was going too fast
to bother with turning the page to a more comfortable angle.
NB.
On the other hand, just to show how attention to detail pays off,
Moebius takes care to make the borders of the whole page petillant,
using the classic scotch rule so beloved by those wood-engraving
petillistes of yore.
The
shorter line-work of the rendering of faces and wall in tier 2 makes a
good optical foil for the superb calligraphic passage of the three
guards standing in the door. When doing linear rendering at a smaller
scale, judicious omission is critical — one is creating a pattern, not
tonal volumes — and Moebius flavors the contour lines with delicate
flecking and dotting which he also deploys in the girl’s face. Note that
most of the minimal marks of her face still cling to the invisible grid
of the contour lines governing an implicit and undrawn crosshatching.
Then
he moves down and lets the girl’s neck go calligraphic, along with the
back of her seat and her shoulders. This panel is quite beautiful, the
mixing of techniques creates an infinite depth of field, in other words,
Moebius avoids the traditional use of a focal design point and lets
everything in the panel come forward all at once. The effect is
dreamlike and precise at once.
Tiers
1 and 2 are inked in a somewhat different style than the bottom of the
page; down here Moebius speeds up his hand. The lines get shorter and
the remaining long lines are really the contour lines, which are far
more jumpy than before. One might say that the bottom of the page has
jettisoned the long-line rule, in which case, we’ll decide to amend our
last rule to:
8a. Speed up on the last tier’s inking.
The
bottom of the page is executed faster and reads faster, more energetic
and jumpier. The final panel has some very long contour lines (almost
naked in their avoidance of thick-thin calligraphy and relying entirely
on the skillful negative spacing of good draftsmanship to succeed) but
most of the linework is fast and “stabby” with the nib. Note how the
spotting of black shadows in the first panel of tier 3 is so nervous
that the white flecks go petillante, which gives the lighting scheme
that classic Moebius solarized desert feeling — even indoors!
The
reason for this change of rule? Who knows … pressing deadlines? Some
unexpected Lebanese Sunshine? A hot date for the night? I think we have
here another axiom of our art-as-performance-game, an axiom which eludes
some critics:
9. Be prepared to go aleatory. Stuff happens, finish the page no matter what.
Perhaps
Moebius sped up on purpose or perhaps he just got distracted by
something, we’ll never know. In any case, we clearly see his hand
speeding up but still remaining accurate.
One
of the paramount qualities of Moebius’ inking style was the dominance
of the hand. His physical pleasure in drawing shaped every line, every
panel and every page. He reminds me very much of Velasquez or Rubens at
their best (which was superhuman), where the brush movements revealed
their total immersion — and joy — in the visual story. (4)
The
long line rule is a basic move in inking and Moebius tended towards it
more and more in his career until he entered a genuine clear-line phase
for several years. It should be pointed out that his draftsmanship was
so good that this was an inevitable development. Technique is mastered
to be thrown away at some point and I think he felt that clear-line
would satisfy this zen-like rule. Alas, not only was the garage airtight
but his draftsmanship seems to have been so innate that he could not
throw it away. (5)
More
to the point for us lesser inking mortals is that fact that the long
line rule is essentially a calligraphic move. At the foot of the page
Moebius slips into a faster mixed tonal-calligraphic mode with a
nervous, shorter line, but the calligraphic still dominates. As a French
inker, Moebius was well aware of the classical line tradition and for
the French (as opposed to the German/Dutch tradition) it really begins
with the calligraphic, not the volumetric attitude.
To
round things off, let’s have a sample of hatching with a long-line and
without significant petillance from Albrecht Dürer, the Renaissance
master who perfected and standardized the two poles of line-work: the
fast-calligraphic-hatching pole and the slow-tonal-crosshatching pole.
Quite an accomplishment and more to the point, both styles still attract
the jaded 21st-century eye (see Rule #3) and reproduce well (Rule #2)
at a minimal cost (Rule #1) when done properly.
We
are all Dürer’s children, even Moebius. Different technologies allowed
the latter to greatly expand the rules of the inking performance-game
but both men relied on this final, most important inker's axiom:
10. Draw, don’t just ink. And remember that you’re drawing with white.
(2) The white of the page is not an empty space; it’s the equivalent of
the black ink. Never forget that you are drawing with white at the same
time as you’re drawing with black, and oftentimes you’ll ink better in
tricky passages if you keep your eye focused on the white — not on the
black — as you ink.
(4) By visual story I don't mean the conceptual ideas and symbols, but
the purely nonverbal meaning generated by the visual structure and
components of a picture: its 2D vocabulary, grammar and syntax. This is
the quality which delights what was once called a “good eye” in the
business and it is the heart of good draftsmanship — not mindless
realism or slick technique.
(5) Was this
because his draftsmanship and personality were the same? A fruitful
subject for the introspective pen-ster with a taste for existential
inkery. The very word draftsmanship is so misunderstood these days, it
seems to be mistaken for having a camera-eye or something similarly
dullard. Draftsmanship is a translation of reality into movements of the
hand which speak pictures in the eye's native language — not the
language of words or dull habit or style.
___________
NB. If
you're interested in the late 70s/early 80s comix & SF scene in
North America, including the French Wave of Heavy Metal, there's a very
fine blog here …
Nicollet, Loustal, Caza, Moebius, plus the great Paul Kirchner, Chaykin,
lots of journeyman SF cover art … I'm keeping my fingers crossed for
some Nicole Claveloux and a bit of B&W Bilal
__________________________________________
Talking Shop about Moebius: #2, On a Clear-Line Day, You Can See Forever
Last week’s look at page 36 of The Airtight Garage
was such jolly fun with its talk of constrained rules and Goldberg
Variations, I’m determined to carry on in the same inky vein with a
look at page 77 of Moebius' Garage.
I
mentioned then that Moebius went through a clear-line phase before
returning to his (cross)hatching habits but I should have been more
precise: he went to a relatively orthodox clear-line phase, for he
already had a modified clear-line "house" style of his own which he used
with great effect, especially in the AG. He had several variations of
the style and on page 77 we see an excellent sample of one of them. The
first specific rule of this page (always bearing in mind the first
Three Rules: keep it black & white, camera-ready and pleasing to
the eye) is:
4. Use supple, relatively fast lines to render contour and explanatory texture.
This
is the fundamental principle of the clear-line style, as practiced by
such masters as Hergé, Joost Swaarte, Ted Benoît, etc. Its commercial
appeal is obvious although it has one catch: it requires thorough
draftsmanship to execute well. Needless to say, Moebius had no problems
in that department and his clear-line, both in the AG and his later
“minimalist” phase, was eye-popping.
His
hand — never forget the physical testimony of the hand! — moves fast
on contour then speeds up and down on detail, lightly varying pressure
upon the nib to create swell. The
whole page looks all-nib, with some lines twice inked to reinforce
the rule of thicker towards the foreground & edges, thinner towards
the back and centers.
Even when the smaller lines look mono-width, they are not. Look carefully and you’ll see the ceaseless, minute waxing and waning that a dip pen gives to the line. Inkers who use Rapidographs lose much in line energy, much more than they gain in convenience. They are often forced to keep lines shorter so as to not betray the spindliness of extended passages. The line breathes when one uses a flexible nib, and when the hand is fast and confident, the result is lively to the eye.
Even when the smaller lines look mono-width, they are not. Look carefully and you’ll see the ceaseless, minute waxing and waning that a dip pen gives to the line. Inkers who use Rapidographs lose much in line energy, much more than they gain in convenience. They are often forced to keep lines shorter so as to not betray the spindliness of extended passages. The line breathes when one uses a flexible nib, and when the hand is fast and confident, the result is lively to the eye.
This is a conversational page,
talking about shape and texture at a brisk (but not hasty) pace. The
pen flirts at times with calligraphy but moderates the ratio of line
thickness to white space just enough to avoid the brush & ink
corporate American comix look. The latter style, which is often a
clear-line style, tends to flex the line severely with mixed results.
The
problem with hard-core clear-line, especially black & white
clear-line, is that the lack of detail often bores the eye after a
while. This is a violation of Rule Three (always make the page
attractive to the viewer) but Moebius was a law-abiding inkster. To keep the eye happy, he modifies the clear-line by:
5. Rendering lots of detail with anything but explanatory hatching
There
is far more detail rendering here than in any page by Hergé or Benoît.
Yes, there is slight hatching to indicate a few shadows but generally,
the pen is in a bas-relief mode of thinking. Volumes are indicated by
rendering around their outer edges or even leaving them blank and
rendering the space behind them to make them pop. The rendering itself is mostly texture and sub-contour and the former is often a sub-species of the latter.
The background of tier 2 is technically brilliant. Note
that it's optically registering as a minimal 20-30% on the grey scale,
ie., the classic Moebius high-keyed look but sans spotting &
shadows. Note
also the faces of all the figures in all the panels. Clear-line
usually symbolizes faces (at the expense of realistic backgrounds) but
Moebius has taken care to make each face spare but precise, using the
language of figure drawing, not cartooning. The difference is subtle
but essential.
By normal clear-line standards, the entire page — and the backgrounds in particular — is over-inked. But look carefully. All the marks are still contour, they are all explanatory, they are all well integrated into the white. There is no risk of confusing the eye, in fact, the opposite is happening, our eyes are enjoying the visual patterns of obsessive detail because they are firmly grounded in optical reality. Our eye loves realistic contour even more than the convenience of orthodox page navigation — confusion is attractive if it is done just so. The total effect is a pleasing optical confusion of foreground and background such as we saw on page 36. Rule 5 (which operates to satisfy Rule 3, the satisfaction of the eye) has been further modified to:
5a. Make everything precise and dreamlike at once by maintaining an infinite depth of field through obsessive detailing.
Note
also the lettering scheme of the last 2 tiers. The lettering is so
muscular and supple (and with a brush, the show-off!) but without
balloons the morphology of the writing melts back into the semiotic ooze
of marks which spawned it. I guess even the words are not really there,
either.
This drive to detail, this French-fried chicken-fat, was one of Moebius' deepest impulses. When he went orthodox clear-line, he also made several statements in print about wanting to shed these obsessions but in the end, he went right back to them. The horror vacui was a basic element of his style, even in clear-line, and style is an expression of personality. Moebius was an honest stylist. The Airtight Garage is a genuine self-performance.
The game of art is the game of personality and obsession and desire. Aesthetic and structural rules encourage the deeply seated, collective human language of picture-making to speak clearly through the trained hand, without useless visual solipsism.
On a more practical level, if you're clear-minded about yourself and your obsessive goals, your style will sort itself it out. Above all, avoid passing fads and short-cuts, they encourage character weaknesses and will literally stunt your growth.
The clear-line style is ancient in commercial illustration, it dates back to Greek vase painting and East Asian block-printing. Let's take a look at one of its first appearances in mass-produced Western commercial book illustration, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Here's several page spreads by an anonymous artist, along with some sharp type-setting by Aldus Manutius, that old slicky-boy of the composing room. Note that all three of the basic rules are in full form here, in both type and ill0s.
This drive to detail, this French-fried chicken-fat, was one of Moebius' deepest impulses. When he went orthodox clear-line, he also made several statements in print about wanting to shed these obsessions but in the end, he went right back to them. The horror vacui was a basic element of his style, even in clear-line, and style is an expression of personality. Moebius was an honest stylist. The Airtight Garage is a genuine self-performance.
The game of art is the game of personality and obsession and desire. Aesthetic and structural rules encourage the deeply seated, collective human language of picture-making to speak clearly through the trained hand, without useless visual solipsism.
On a more practical level, if you're clear-minded about yourself and your obsessive goals, your style will sort itself it out. Above all, avoid passing fads and short-cuts, they encourage character weaknesses and will literally stunt your growth.
The clear-line style is ancient in commercial illustration, it dates back to Greek vase painting and East Asian block-printing. Let's take a look at one of its first appearances in mass-produced Western commercial book illustration, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Here's several page spreads by an anonymous artist, along with some sharp type-setting by Aldus Manutius, that old slicky-boy of the composing room. Note that all three of the basic rules are in full form here, in both type and ill0s.
The clear-line of these illos is not as over-rendered as Moebius' baroque variations but it is equally effective. The general aim is still the same: dazzle the reader with a stripped down but compelling approximation of optical reality. There's more about the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili here and guess what? It was constructed according to various obscure constraints of a symbolic and allegorical nature, rather like The Garage.
Constraints and rules! They are the inker's friends, not their chains! Accept the hermetically sealed confines of your own airtight garage and feed your head!
______________________________________________
Talking Shop about Moebius: #3, I ink the body electric
The Airtight Garage started off as a bit of a larkish bagatelle but as the book progressed, Moebius employed more and more stylistic & technical variations: fast vs. slow, chicken-fat vs. clear-line, etc. But it’s in the very first section, the Major Fatal prologue, that he really played his hand, as we gambling inkers say.
I
have to confess that page 10 is one of my favorite pages in the entire
AG. It’s a classic example of direct inking, where the penciling is
minimal and the inking is mostly improvised on the fly. Such a strategy
compels the inker’s hand to show its stuff without resorting to any
stylistic subterfuge and is not for the weak-hearted and handed.
The
rule of this page (and yes, the first three rules of black & white
camera-ready art that pleases the eye are still in force) is zen-like in
its simplicity:
4. Ink to reveal the hand, not just the objects being rendered
It’s
all about the hand, its presence on this page is overwhelming, much
more so than in most commercial work Moebius (and other illustrators)
did. Until several years ago, most book & high-end magazine work
preferred a crisp, slick surface. The hand was usually hidden behind a
Potemkin village of polished, impenetrable marks and on the whole,
readers seemed to prefer it that way.
The
Major Fatal prologue was a bit of a reaction to this. On page 10, the
hand shows itself everywhere — but never clumsily. And it’s not just the
obvious scribbling on the man’s face in panel 1 or the nervous foliage
in panel 3. The entire pattern created by the hand’s movement leaps
forward to create a nervous tension on all levels.
Panel
2 is exquisitely well-inked and deserves careful study. The background
has vanished and we’re left with a brilliant, fast passage of contour
drawing on horse & rider. It is so fast that we can see the delicate
marks of the half-lifted nib whenever it changes heading. The nib is
omnidirectional, it’s rounded enough to move spontaneously in all
directions, unlike more precise nibs which catch and “sneeze” ink when
moving too fast.
This
gives the hand free rein to manoeuver and also allows the physical
liquidity of the ink to flavor the rendering. That is to say, the ink
blobs and crawls a bit (and each brand of ink behaves differently)
whenever the hand’s impetus overwhelms the nib’s inertia.
The
movements are economical, the nib leaves the paper as little as often,
note the liquid parsimony of the man’s splayed hand. The description of
the horse’s head perfectly breaks up the positive & negative spaces
and then the pen goes down the neck, first hatching from 1 o’clock to 7
o’clock, then squiggling nervously and executing a half-spiral before
exiting that passage.
Here’s
an overlay explaining this. It also shows the same rapid, automatic
movement of the hand that has rendered the man’s face in panel 1. The
whiskers are grizzled with nervous scribbling while the eyes & nose
are perfectly described with furious hatching.
This
sort of fast, unthinking and rhythmic angling of a nib around a
spherical volume not only describes an object; it’s also provides an
immense, somatic pleasure to the inker’s hand. It feels right. The
pleasure of movement is the key. The experienced hand’s muscle memory
renders such angling passages with gusto. And as I've mentioned before,
this "stabby" spherical movement was the foundation of Moebius'
crosshatching technique, a technique which we'll analyze in a later
posting.
I
mentioned the stylistic Potemkin village before. The inker’s hand is
often hidden behind one and to be honest, it’s not such a bad thing
after all. This writer, in his own inking, has deeply immured himself in
a byzantine, utterly impenetrable Potemkin village of inking. Perhaps
one day I’ll venture out and mingle with the local mujiks but for now, I
prefer my hand to remain hidden. The somatic pleasure of intricate
crosshatching has its own peculiar intensity, in particular when
rendering the long serpentine arcs of deeply spherical volumes at
obsessive length.
It’s
important for modern inkers to remember that not only are they
entertaining eyes but that they are doing so by making a unique
hand-made object. Electronically shuffling numbers and facts in the
digital Potemkin village of virtual reality pays better but the mental
and physical pleasure of highly skilled manual labor has its own
rewards. The mass reproduction of these objects is a subject unto itself
but for now, the point is understanding how Moebius built his success
upon his hand, upon the specific marks and general patterns that its
movement made upon the page.
His
performance was not only conceptually stimulating, it was also
physically grounded in the reality of muscle and nerve and steel and
paper and ink. The Airtight Garage was a mental and physical performance on all levels.
Finally,
here’s two examples of pen work which show the hand. I apologize for
the da Sesto’s quality, my main reference library is 600 miles away and I
must rely on the internet for these drawings.
Albrecht Dürer, pen and ink
Cesare da Sesto, pen & ink
These
are pen and ink performances from the early Renaissance, one in the
Italian style and one in the German style. I usually choose mechanically
reproduced examples (to match the three rules of The Airtight Garage) but this time I wanted to show the naked hand, so to speak.
We
artists work in a world obsessed with creating perfectly commodified
virtual realities which disdain the ethos of the skilled hand — for both
commercial and conceptual
reasons, I fear. But the airtight performances of Moebius — they dance
elegant rings around the clumsy shambles of these latest re-inventions
of our human reality.
The
rhetoric of the hand, it's a resurgence of the Baroque aesthetic, in
essence, and it re-affirms the power — and utility — of drawing
happily. Ecce homo faber!
NB. One
other thought has occurred to me regarding the stylistic display of the
hand in inking: the use of Rapidographs & felt-tip markers. There
are many inkers who do excellent work with the latter tools but this
curmudgeon must confess that he harbors the sneaking suspicion that
these artists' work would be even better
with dip pens … the mono-width nib doesn't really show how one's hand
has pushed and pulled and scrabbled about on the paper with the nib. The
convenience is outweighed by the reduction in stylistic options.
Crosshatching is deadened, the hand-heavy style is restrained and as for
clear line with Rapidograph — the horror, the horror!
_________________________________________
Talking Shop about Moebius: #4, Ink Lightly into that Dark Night
Inking
is a physical performance in which the extreme polarity of the marks
being made allows little room for fuzzy thinking or clumsy action. One
must be precise and accurate whether one's moves are bold or delicate,
and in the latter mode, Moebius was the undisputed champion. Not many
inkers can keep things so quiet yet energetic, as Moebius did when he
was in the mood.
Here’s page 30 of The Airtight Garage
and after 34 years, it still makes this inker seethe with a happy envy.
It is a performance governed by a simple rule (in addition to the 3
Prime Directives of camera-ready, eye-pleasing black & white line
art):
4. Toujours délicat — always delicate!
This
page is an homage to the expressive powers of a crowquill nib handled
with care. Each panel retreats backwards in point-of-view, shedding
detail but always staying crisp and balanced and detailed at the precise
level needed to maintain continuity and attract the eye further. The
breakup of white space is completely interlocked with the lines, the
spotting is perfect — in fact, there is little one can express with
words to do justice to this performance.
Note
the petillance in panel 2; the woman’s hair is an optical eye-sink
which perfectly balances the spotting above her. Also note that on this
page, Moebius tackles one of the great technical challenges of any
inker: realistically rendering disparate textures in the same page. In
panel 1 we have the delicate flesh of a woman (more about that in a
moment), the short-napped fur of her jacket collar, the rougher
masculine flesh of the hand pointing to her, the burned edges of paper
and even the brass screen of a hash pipe with ashes in it. In the next
panels we have hair, pearls,, shiny fabrics, a puff ball of sorts and
even smoke.
Nothing
makes an inker sweat harder than tackling lots of different textures in
one rendering, it requires careful choices in choosing one's marking
system so that the entire assembly makes sense in the end. If, for
example, one over-renders the female’s face, then everything else
usually needs more rendering to stay in tune and this may skew the tonal
design. If the cigarette smoke had been crosshatched (as Moebius does
on other pages of the AG) then the fabric it floats over may need more
rendering to keep up visually.
In
other words, when rendering disparate textures, the decisions made with
the lighter textures set the tone for everything else and when one then
considers lighting and modeling (which Moebius ignores here, the
scamp!), things can get tricky.
The
delicate touch of this page smites this inker’s heart mostly keenly in
panel 1, which we see blown up here. It is a bible for crosshatching in
the first quarter-tones of the grey scale.
I
mentioned that Jerry Cornelius’ face is rendered in the feminine style,
ie. when inking women, always maintain a lighter touch and avoid
modeling. Supposedly, Moebius used Patti Smith as photo reference for
this face, I don’t know if this is true but no matter, he rendered her
perfectly. The hatching describes the spherical volumes in the classic
Moebius “stabby” short pattern with the classic Moebius 90-degree
crosshatching in judicious passages.
Two
additional points: first, Moebius has broken one of the Prime
Directives here, the linework is dropping out slightly. I’ve seen
several different print runs of this page and they are not quite up to
snuff. He made the dots and lines of this passage too delicate and they
are dropping ever so slightly. This is the danger of delicate crowquill
work and this is why most fastidious, delicate cross-hatchers work at
same size or very close to it. No reduction minimizes the dangers of
sloppy pre-press, digital or photo-neg. It also reduces the sheer amount
of labor required in covering the page with obsessive marks.
I
know that Moebius had a fetish for inking bigger and bigger at one time
in his career; I do not know the original size of this page and if any
readers do, please let us know. My gut feeling is that this page was
reduced too much — not that it was subjected to sloppy prepress.
The
other point is one that seems to perplex some younger illustrators
& comix lovers. Using photo reference is a perfectly healthy and
useful practice for the illustrator, it is not cheating or “faking”.
Before the camera came along, professional artists (ie. illustrators in
modern parlance) used models and drew from life, often keeping these
drawings in collections which were used as reference by other artists in
the studio. When photography came along, they began collecting
photographs of appropriate subject matter and continue to do so even
now.
The
danger of photos lies in their over-use by developing draftsmen, who
unwittingly learn to copy the distortions and omissions of the
photographic process and thus stunt their growth. Photos always lie in
subtle ways and the experienced draftsman learns to correct them without
conscious thought, simply by using his good eye.
In
any case, despite the dropping of lines, panel 1 is an amazing
performance. A delicate mood is maintained despite the wide span of
tones and textures being rendered. The crosshatching on the face is
classic, it demonstrates the natural evolutionary growth of stippling to
hatching to crosshatching.
The
delicate touch is a learned touch, it requires the hand to perform at
the very edge of its physicality. Moebius mastered it after years of
practice and used it to great effect in The Airtight Garage and elsewhere.
Let’s see an example of Albrecht "Big Daddy" Dürer in the same mode, a detail from his Fall of Man
engraving. This sample has been blown up considerably and shows a
consummate mastery of the stipple-hatch-crosshatch progression executed
with the most demanding — and expressive — linear tool ever devised, the
engraving burin.
I urge students of inking to visit the site that I got this sample from,
it’s a massive blow-up of the engraving from Google and the
MOFA-Boston. 75% of everything you need to know about classical,
long-line spherical crosshatching is in this engraving. It's all in the
hands, baby.
Moebius
performed with pen and ink and paper, Dürer performed with steel and
copper and engraver’s ink but the song remains the same — a woman’s
face, a brass screen, a fur collar — it's all the same melodic,
physically-inflected line. If it feels good (to your hand), it's good.
______________________________________
My Illustrative Process behind The Gentleman: #1, A Slap in the Face
The novel is a bit hard to classify, which is always a good thing … a multi-homage to James Cabell, P.G. Wodehouse, various steampunk illuminati and even such recondite corkers such as The Diary of a Nobody and Augustus Carp. Set in a slipstreamed 19th-century, the story involves the romantic intrigues of a young poet who has accidentally consigned his young bride to hell. There's lots of steam-powered ornithopters, pistol duels, satanic visitations, cool Victorian womenswear and more to my point, both the author and the editorial team (Ed Park editing, Claire Vacarro art directing) were keenly aware that James Cabell's illustrator was none other than the late, great Frank Papé.
That posed a conundrum for this illustrator. Papé tended to go for a very Symbolist handling of his material and although Forrest was certainly working the same Cabellian vein, he had wandered off in a more Victorian steampunk direction. I felt it best to emphasize the Victorian feel with a faux wood engraving style of rendering plus a more sedate Victorian style of design. Melodrama on a stage within a defined picture frame, that's the way they liked it back then. Which is where this process post kicks off: the initial thumbnail concept for a scene illustrating the young hero-poet being soundly slapped by his angry sister in the presence of their much-suffering butler.
The text box at the bottom was for Claire's initial idea of running a title cartouche at the bottom of every full-pg illo, in the true Papé spirit, an idea she later dropped. In any case, the main thing was the thumbnail was clearly Victorian in feel and gave full scope for lots of Easter eggs.
I'd like to note that this thumbnail concept was probably the 4th or 5th idea I had for this picture, it's really important to not be satisfied with your first or even second idea, it's usually best to sleep on it and come up with more ideas, for several days if possible and eventually, things will work out for the best. This is the great advantage of book illustration, you have the time to think at length. And nap between thumbnails, that's always nice, plus lots of tea, that goes without saying.
After approval of thumbnail, I did a tight pencil on vellum, focussing
only on outlines. Sometimes I do a value study, usually in Photoshop
atop a scan of the pencil but I didn't on this picture. On reflection,
that was a mistake on my part. In any case, Ed and Claire seemed happy
with this pencil and as far as the values went, there was only one
possible solution: a background of about 40%K, going from light to dark
as the page descended to create a theatrical effect (something Gustave
Doré often did to great effect) and everything else high-contrast, with
shadows about 75%, a few midtones at about 25% and sufficient blown-out
highlights.
This pencil was about 20, 30% larger than my final inking, which I did from a reduced scan of the pencil. That final inking was still about 15% larger than the final print version. My eyes are tired and my hands arthritic, every square inch hurts. I ink on denril, a synthetic vellum, with acrylic ink, using dip nibs, on this job, Gillot 1950 for the tight lines and Brause 66EF for the heavier lines. Really tight hairlines were done with a Hunt 104. I use a floating, illuminated magnifying lens while wearing a specially prescribed pair of coke-bottle lensed glasses designed to magnify at 20 cms. I like to ink very tight and very clean. When this job was done, I had some posters made of the art for promotional purposes, the inking easily blew up to 400% while looking very crisp and optically balanced.
Using dip nibs is mandatory for serious, complex inking and any inker who thinks that they can get away with felt-tips is only kidding themselves, their inking will always lack snap and energy. The constant swell and contraction of the dip nib conveys the movement of the hand and wrist, which is the essence of good inking. I also avoid using scratchboard for the same reason, the scraper blades cannot flex, giving the line work a mechanical feel. Sometimes that's necessary but frankly, I loathe it. As for digital inking … my opinion of it is unprintable.
But they were right, she wasn't quite on the mark. Every book you illustrate involves a drift away from the text towards your own ideas on the same material, and sometimes that drift works and sometimes it doesn't. In any case, this picture was a problem child (the fact that it was the first picture I inked was part of the problem, you tend to warm up conceptually and physically as you go along).
And so, dear reader, I cropped it. Thank the gods of obsessive inking that I had the extra space and size to make it work in the trim size. I also inked a new head, can't remember if I did it on this drawing or a separate piece of Denril, but in any case, here it is: A Slap in the Face, Redux.
To sum up for the jury, every line must have a purpose and every white space also. The primary purpose is narrative, the secondary is optical pleasure, which is the same thing but on a more visceral level. Never hesitate to spend extra time on a picture, no matter the client. Do a lot of thumbnails, pencil thoroughly to cover all inking contingencies and no matter your inking style, take the time to make it look the best you humanly can at that moment in your development.
On a final but inevitable mercenary note, if anyone wishes to purchase some of the original art for this book, drop me a line … mahendra373 at hotmail dot com. Support the arts by supporting my need to nap and drink tea between inking bouts! Aye, work is the curse of the inking classes.
____________________________________
My Illustrative Process behind The Gentleman: #2, I Ink Therefore I am
Another process post for one of the 17 pictures I did for Forrest Leo's novel, The Gentleman …
Books about books are always fun and The Gentleman is very much about other books: Dante, Tennyson, James Cabell, the entire Beerbohm/Wodehouse cabal, it's all grist for this particular literary mill. Which brings us to Chapter 6, where the two main protagonists meet for the first time. Naturally, they meet in a bookstore whilst drinking tea (what else?) and it's not any ordinary bookstore, it's Tompkin's Bookstore, an emporium of all that is recondite and obscure and generally very cool about books and reading.
Here's my rough thumbnail, final pencil and final inks for this chapter … a stonehenge of biblioliths from which the inventor Kensington emerges, lit by a single spot, in the approved Gustave Doré manner.
Like certain North American chain bookstores, Tompkin's Bookstore also sells the usual accessory tchotchkes and fanfreluches, but not of the dreaded scented candle type, no, Tompkins only offers the finest oneiric baubles and creatures that dreams can buy.
And dreams are really what books (and books about books) are all about. They are the universal, biological template of storytelling and more to the point, they are stories told by the same person that they are meant to entertain, a recursive ploy similar to drawing a picture for a book-about-books.
Pretty heavy stuff for a book about sending one's wife to hell but I draw 'em as I see 'em, with eyes wide shut.
I the Moebius entries and the Gentle Man studies!
ReplyDeleteAmazing stuff, Mahendra!
Thanks, Martin. Any reader lurking here who loves genuinely mordant satire needs to read Martin's Encyclopaedia of Hell. It is required reading for the damned.
Delete