Drawing Comics: Lines
Thus far we’ve seen that graphic novels cover a wide range of topics, that they capture the full brain’s potential by tapping into both the rational and artistic sides, and that comics are largely organized through panels, often bordered by frames.
Now we can appreciate what’s inside the frames: the artwork. Like many a sketch artist, let’s start with the simplest art stroke: the line.
Graphic artists use many different media: pen and ink, pencil and graphite, brush and ink, watercolor, pastel, paint, and digital. Most also use lines. Lines are drawn around the panels to create frames; lines are used to draw bubbles around the words spoken. Most make their initial sketches with simple lines, and many artists stick with lines to create the finished work, as well.
Think of the comics in print media such as newspapers or The New Yorker, or editorial comics you can see on the web: they are largely line-based works of art. Some of the graphic books I’ve mentioned also follow the stereotypical line-based format of comics: Fun Home is one. Others I haven’t mentioned are Mission in a Bottle—about how the Honest Tea company began—and What Unites Us—reporter Dan Rather’s testimony to what makes America great already.
Lines mastered by these artists can evoke just about any image in a reader’s brain, creating the scenes and stories that we enjoy. We can see in these simple lines the emotive expressions of characters, complex city scenes, spaceship interiors, and the wonders of nature. While the use of lines can get more complex in these simple line-based graphic works, our brains can focus more on the topic being covered but might miss out on the craftmanship rendered to carry that story forward.
Lines can become more of an artistic focus in graphic novels by the sheer complexity of how they are rendered. I think of My Favorite Thing is Monsters with its heavy use of cross-hatching as one example. Emil Ferris uses colored and graphite pencils to create a stunning work through an almost total reliance on lines to convey dreams, horrors, mundane daily life, emotions, and even the characters’ interiorscapes. She’s a master of the line.
Another beautiful way to expand the artistic use of lines is with brush and ink, one of my favorite approaches to graphic works. Brush and ink begin to cross the boundary between a strict reliance on lines and the use of planes—colors—to convey imagery.
I think of Habibi by Craig Thompson or Peter Kuper’s adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Anything done by Craig Thompson has the fluidity of life drawn into every brushstroke. Kuper’s artwork is denser and heavier, evoking the “present” narrator’s situation with pen and ink and the narrator’s “past” story with black pencil and ink wash.
All books mentioned are available through our local library system. So draw yourself a line down to your library and enter a whole new universe of imagery!
webonbooks.com for more articles by William.