In December of 2019, I completed a fifteen+ page comic of my own design. Well, I called it a “manga” because it reads right to left and I was reading a lot of that at the time, but let’s not kid ourselves here. The project spanned over half the semester, and it represents some of the most focused work I have ever undertaken. I was drawing every day, planning character designs and studying figures often. I can say with confidence that the comic project was some of the happiest work I have ever undertaken. It is strange, then, that the existence of the project pretty much evaporated from my mind the following year. The all-consuming wave of the pandemic wiped my brain like a magnet on a hard drive.
Once I find a suitable means of digitizing the comic, it will be uploaded here in full. For now, I would like to document some of the steps I took to place my life in the optimal configuration to draw as often as possible. I think the under-discussed key to improving at drawing (at least from the outset) is constant iteration. One must draw as much as possible. This is easier said than done, and this post contains the methods I used to achieve a state of boundless productivity.
I started the project by spending money. I’m a consumer whore at heart, and if I don’t buy something shiny, I won’t be satisfied that I’ve got the right stuff. My animal brain will dwell on what I don’t have and prevent me from starting in the first place. If you know anything about online drawing communities, then you are already familiar with this phenomenon. Tablet mania runs deep—many aspiring artists won’t start drawing until they purchase an expensive piece of Wacom tech. They realize with horror, as I have realized multiple times before, that it is not the technology that makes the artist. The drawings remain shit, even when rendered in Photoshop. Rather than feeling depressed over this mental dependence on shiny new things, I decided to leverage my habit to my benefit.
My girlfriend and I took a bus into Boston to buy some drawing supplies, mainly a notebook. There is a store on Mass Ave called Muji (It’s practically on top of the Massachusetts Turnpike). Muji is a kind of Japanese junk stores. It’s like an Apple Store for clothes and household knickknacks that plays hard into a beige, wood panel aesthetic. It is soothingly boring in there. Beanbags, benches, and incense complete the vibe. While most of their junk is priced beyond consideration, they used to boast a beautiful selection of stationery and pens. I still carry around $3 pocket-sized Muji notebooks for note taking and idea spaghetti on the go (the price has since raised a dollar, but I had the foresight to stock up). For this project, I grabbed something even cheaper, these $1.50 blank notebooks with basic binding.
If you are buying a drawing notebook, go dirt cheap. Seriously. When you spend big for a notebook with good paper and expensive binding, it doesn’t feel so great to fill it with shit. The fear of wasting a page on a bad drawing will ultimately get between you and the primary objective of drawing all the time. Don’t let the Youtuber artists fool you. These practice notebooks aren’t going to be beautiful flipping material from the onset, though you will be proud to do so when the notebook is finally full. I have considered doing away with buying notebooks completely, but stapled printer paper poses a serious durability problem. The inexpensive Muji notebooks are awesome because they still look and smell great when you buy them, so they scratch that purchase itch without making a dent in your conscious. You can even use these stamps they have to add little designs to them. Very Muji. The notebooks are on the smaller size and thin too, so you can slip them into a backpack or smaller bag without losing space or risking serious damage by crushing or bending them. Unfortunately, I don’t think Muji carries these things anymore. Before the pandemic, they slimmed their selection down considerably and most of their budget stationary disappeared. I intend to write them a letter.
I also visited my local comic shop and picked up a handful of material from the fifty-cent bin. Old Marvels. These would be my reference. The simplicity of the line work and high contrast coloration makes for simple study material. My reasoning stood that by copying entire panels from these comic books, I could develop an internal library of poses and figures to draw upon in my own work. Art is plagiarism, don’t forget that. These comics also provide that dopamine rush of spending money on something cool and are destruction-proof. I wouldn’t be particularly upset if these trash comics suddenly burnt to a crisp while I slept. By either sheer coincidence or the logic of industrial binding, the comics and the Muji notebooks were the same size. They could be leafed into each other to create a single, convenient bundle.
The bundle turned out to be everything. One day before Shakespeare class, at a point in the semester when the wind was brisk but still tolerable enough to sit outside, I pulled out my materials on a metal bench and just started copying the things I saw in the comic. The activity was so engrossing that I almost missed the start of class. I began undertaking these simple studies whenever I had downtime—between classes, while procrastinating another project, etc. By making my practice as portable and straightforward as possible, I had solved my mental block and managed to make drawing fun again. After years of cranking out meaningless essay materials on pure deadline stress and adrenaline, the shift to working on a project long term and loving every second of it was shocking. It is important to remember that it is possible to feel that way about work.
I did some pretty clever things over the course of this project. Inking was a problem. I didn’t want the final comic to look like it was drawn from pencil, but tracing is difficult without a light table. I had to invent my own. During my Halloween all-nighter to complete the first draft, I found a flat-screen TV and pilfered a sheet of glass from the university art complex. By laying the TV on its back with the glass on top of it, I was able to create a functional light table. I must have looked insane, but at least I could revise my work.
The pandemic should have offered me a slate of time to continue this craft unbothered by practical reality, but it fled my mind in March. Many things did. This website is another lost item. I had finally crafted a canvas for publishing my writing and artwork online, but this blog went blank shortly after quarantine began. Maybe some artists can work in such stifled conditions, but I quickly lost grasp of time and sank into the simulated world.
I want to get drawing back. Maybe the comic shop is still open?