Aside from giving myself a papercut, I’m pretty pleased with how this page came out.
Incidentally, if anybody has a time machine handy, can I borrow it to go back to the days I thought it would be adequate to work on A4 printer paper and smack myself in the jaw? Thanks.
Where Aang’s greatest teaching has clearly taken hold.
You’re probably familiar with the adage that mastering a skill takes 10,000 hours of practise. It’s an arbitrary number, meant to illustrate that practise makes perfect. Whatever.
Well, 30 days ago I made an equally arbitrary decision to shoot for that number. I figured out that if I drew for four hours a day, every day, I’d hit 10,000 hours in just under seven years - i.e. before I turn thirty. That seems like a pretty cool goal!
Now, realistically, life gets in the way. I’m not an art student, and I’m not in a position to become one any time soon. Between the chaos of real life and the necessity of real work, I probably won’t manage to draw for four hours every single day for seven years. But just like the nice round number of 10,000 hours, four hours a day is something ambitious yet achievable. Something to aim for. So I set out and started logging my drawing time on Toggl, with the promise to myself that I could brag once I hit thirty days straight.
And guess what, you guys??
It was a lot easier than I expected. Sure, there have been nights where I’ve had to race the clock to log four hours before midnight, but there have also been mornings where I’ve woken up stoked to do two straight hours of figure drawing. There were days when I had nothing but time, yet struggled to raise a pencil…but then there was the day I sat my final exam, came home and finished three pages of my comic in a sitting, and watched a movie before bed. And there was the day I clocked six hours! Yow!
So after thirty days, I’ve ticked off 129 hours of drawing, and I can already see and feel a thrilling difference. I’m going to keep up the 4-hour/day regime, and hopefully I’ll be back in another month to brag a little more.
Dumbo’s ‘crows’ sequence from 1941.
Much like the apes who ‘want to do like other men do’ in The Jungle Book, this is a scene which flies under a lot of people’s radar even today.
Notice that the lead crow’s name is Jim. Yes, Jim Crow. As in the US race segregation laws, named after a popular blackface routine. Notice also the crows’ naggingly familiar facial characteristics. Round black faces, round, simple white eyes, thick, smiling beaks.
And what about that dance they’re doing? Where have you seen that before? Well, for one thing, many of the animated steps and moves are the same as those performed by King Louie’s people in The Jungle Book. In fact, if you’ve ever watched much American cinema from the 30s-40s, you probably have encountered that big-stepping swing style over and over again. And you probably haven’t seen many white characters doing it. This is because these black caricature song-and-dance sequences were a direct product of minstrelsy.
The typical minstrel performance followed a three-act structure. The troupe first danced onto stage then exchanged wisecracks and sang songs. The second part featured a variety of entertainments, including the pun-filled stump speech. The final act consisted of a slapstick musical plantation skit or a send-up of a popular play.
Yes, a wisecracking, stump-speaking, pun spinning, musical troupe of fictional black characters, conceived and written by white artists for a white target audience. This is starting to get a little uncomfortable, isn’t it?
If you’re still not convinced that Dumbo’s crows or The Jungle Book’s apes are the potted minstrel show I’m suggesting (“But they’re not really black people, they’re cartoon animals!” / “Of course they’ll pun/joke/talk funny, they’re cartoon characters!”), here’s a bit of homework:
Watch this sequence from the Marx brothers’ 1935 A Day at the Races and see how many elements of music, dance and costume you can find in common between its depiction of black performers and Dumbo’s use of the crows. Finally, ask yourself: Would you feel comfortable showing the Marx brothers clip to a small child, without explaining its social context?
whoops, effortposting
Beautiful! I love good stop-motion animation, and I especially love stop-motion music videos. The physicality of them is a completely unique kind of alchemy that I hope we never lose.
(Source: youtu.be)
Self indulgent future-comic doodles.
(they are actual twins, my samefaces aren’t that egregious)
A very productive day! Three pages of the endless buffer down, three more to go before inking.
I will rest very well tonight, and study hard tomorrow.
good kitty
e: I feel really bad that I haven’t uploaded anything of my own in so long. I’m working flat out to get the comic together in time for graduation, as well as studying for finals, and it doesn’t leave much time for anything else.
After Wednesday, things should change, just…bear with me being an empty shell of gifs and reblogs until then.
In my storyboarding class the other day, the professor asked a student why he chose to make his main character a cavewoman instead of a caveman. The story was nongendered, the protagonist could have been either (or any), and yet it was suddenly necessary to determine an exact reason they should…
This is an excellent post by a smart person.
I’m really depressed that the anecdote in question took place at the stage you are in your creative education, though. This is why intersectional critique needs to be part of every syllabus. They’re not complex concepts, and people are free to argue with/about them, but jesus backflipping christ, it’s disheartening to remember how many people get all the way through the further education system without so much as encountering a perspective outside the SAWCSM bubble.
