Drawing From Life

I'm fond of saying that drawing skills aren't particularly necessary for making comics. It's a narrative medium, not an illustrative one the traditional sense. Some of its best practitioners draw simply, even crudely, but are so skilled at organizing and conveying information that it hardly matters. That's the job. I myself occasionally give a lecture titled "WHAT to Draw, Not HOW to Draw."

That said, drawing skills are certainly a nice bonus if you draw in a way that's even a little bit representational, as most of us do. It might start with childhood tracing of art you've seen and liked. Then you move on to trying to imitate your favourite artists. Eventually -- hopefully -- you absorb those influences, gaining the trained eye and the muscle memory required to develop a style of your own. An essential part that process is drawing from life.

A one-minute gesture drawing

I was lucky to have a high school art teacher (shout out to Linda Maskell-Pereira, formerly of Central Elgin Collegiate Institute in St. Thomas, Ontario, Canada) who really emphasised drawing skills. We didn't do nudes at that age, of course, but she would routinely pick a student from the class to sit or stand on a table and pose for the rest of us to draw. We learned about gesture drawings -- quick, expressive sketches that capture the lines and basic forms of a pose in a simple, efficient way -- and "blind" drawing, where you don't look at your paper at all, forcing you to really look at the model in detail. Both teach you that drawing is about seeing. It's something you do with your eyes and brain, not your hand. It's hard to imagine anyone learning to draw well without at least some experience at this.

30-second gesture drawings

Later, I did a year of Fine Arts at university (before switching my major to Film Studies because I knew visual storytelling was where my heart really was.) The program included a lot of nude figure drawing, of course. But once I left school and eventually embarked on a career -- first in illustration, then in comics -- I stopped doing it. As much as you may enjoy it, when you draw all day (and I do mean all day -- I'm typically at the desk around ten or twelve hours on weekdays) sometimes the last thing you want to do at the end of it is even more drawing. Eventually my two kids came along and life got even busier. Plus, I figured I'd done the life drawing thing and learned everything I needed from it.

However.

The thing about drawing professionally is that you're working quickly. Especially in comics, which require an astonishing amount of drawing. There's rarely time to reference things outside of shooting some awkward photos of yourself on your phone. So you end up drawing out of your head a lot, and developing shortcuts that inevitably become the things people recognize as your "style." Which is perfectly natural, and part of the game. But drawing effectively, even in a simplified, stylized way, requires you to understand what you're leaving out. And drawing from memory requires your memory banks to be full of gestures, forms, surfaces. Poses. See where I'm going with this?

By 2017, about twenty years into my art career, my memory banks were feeling empty. My drawing style was starting to reference itself more than it was referencing the people and objects it was meant to represent. And the more experienced I got, the more I wanted my "style" to just be good drawing. The solution was obvious: I needed to start drawing from life again. Fill those memory banks. Remember what I was leaving out.

Luckily, I still lived close to my old university, where the Fine Art department still held life drawing sessions, which were free for alumni. So I started going to that every week or so to get back on my game. Other sessions began popping up all over town; like axe throwing or brewing your own beer, life drawing was briefly hip in the late 2010s. I tried out many of them. It was nice to draw for fun again, with no deadlines or fan expectations, in a social setting. When the Covid lockdowns in 2020 eventually shut those sessions all down, I fell off the wagon again. But I've recently gone back, and for the same reasons: to prevent my professional work from becoming too reflexive, and to give me an excuse to get out of the house on Wednesday nights.

This model's day job was as a house painter. She brought some of her tools of the trade to the session, which resulted in some refreshing (and practical!) poses.

Gesture drawings of a model who was six months pregnant.

Is it weird being room in a room with a nude stranger? Sure, for about two minutes. But once you start drawing -- start seeing -- you might as well be sketching a bowl of fruit. It's lines and forms, textures and lighting, proportion and weight. In that respect, it's good to draw as many types of bodies as you can. It keeps things interesting, and also makes sure your memory banks are as diverse as possible so that you don't end up drawing the same two or three "ideal" bodies over and over again. A good life drawing session will vary their models week to week for this reason. Over the years I've drawn people who were tall, short, fit, unfit, male, female, trans, pregnant. I've drawn amputees. I once drew a woman with a colostomy bag. Depending on the venue, there's also been any number of costumes and props. Everyone has different proportions, carries their weight in a different place, and poses themselves in a way that's them. You learn very quickly that bodies are unique, and uniquely interesting.

It's valuable to see that, even just on a person level. But if you draw human beings in your work, even in a "cartoon" style, it's vital.

Historical "Accuracy"

Note: this post is a lightly edited and updated version of one that appeared in November 2020 on my perpetually neglected Two Generals Research Blog, which hasn't been updated in more than four years. (I'd thought the pandemic was the perfect time to get into a thorough behind-the-scenes look at the making of my 2010 graphic biography about my grandfather Law Chantler's WWII experiences. And it was. But then it ended, and I got busy again with new work and promotional appearances and, you know, life.)

I like this post, though, so I'm moving it here to my main site, in the hope that it might find more eyeballs. I refer people to it often, every time the question of "historical accuracy" in storytelling -- be it books, comics, films, TV, or whatever else -- rears its head, which it often does. It's a question that riles both fans who don't understand history very well, and historians who don't understand art very well.

My answer, as I'll explain at length below, is usually "accurate to whom?"

"TRUTH"

The opening panel of Two Generals takes us into the narrative by declaring "all of this is true." This pronouncement generated a lot of discussion at the script stage between myself and my editor, who thought the line set an awfully high (and likely unattainable) bar regarding historical accuracy.

After much thoughtful and productive back and forth, it was decided that the line was okay, because what it doesn't say is "all of this is FACT." As I've written and discussed elsewhere, facts are facts, but truth often depends on where you're standing.

Juggling the objective and the subjective is a big part of writing any kind of non-fiction. Two Generals was my first attempt at such (my 2007 graphic novel Northwest Passage, which many readers assumed was based on real historical events, was actually fiction, though I took the misassumption as a compliment). I began with the highest hopes that Two Generals would be as accurate as possible; that it would, ideally, read as my grandfather's story and not mine. I discovered very quickly that such authenticity is simply impossible.

For starters, any research you do relies on the accuracy of others. With Two Generals, I was lucky to have a wealth of primary sources at my fingertips: my grandfather's 1943 diary, his friend Jack Chrysler's letters to his wife, the regimental diary of The Highland Light

Infantry of Canada, and my own interviews with Colonel Doug Barrie (a friend of both my grandfather's and Jack's.) But even primary sources, as immediate as they are, are not 100% reliable. The version of Jack that emerges in Law's diary is not exactly the one that appears in Jack's own correspondence. Nor is the straightforward, all-business Law Chantler of the diary the one who sometimes appears in Jack's letters. Details presented as fact in the regiment's records were, I would eventually learn, demonstrated to be incorrect as the decades wore on. And the memories of Col. Barrie, while full of powerful personal insight, were those of an 86-year-old man doing his best to recall events from over sixty years before.

Any police officer will tell you how unreliable eyewitness accounts can be. Any number of people, recalling the same event, will remember it in different ways (Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, one of the greatest films ever made, is about this very idea). The passage of time only compounds the effect. Throw in people's personal and political agendas, not to mention the wild card that is human personality, and you can see how muddy the water becomes.

Obviously, some things can be nailed down as cold, hard facts. For instance, D-Day was June 6th, 1944. Claiming it happened in mid-August would be demonstrably incorrect. But the individual experiences recounted by soldiers on that day are always going to vary, not just because of the variation of the experience from ship to ship, beach to beach, or regiment to regiment, but because of the variation from one man to another, and the lens each of them looked at the world through. Or looks back through.

So what's the writer of non-fiction to do? You do all the research you can, get to know your subject from the inside, and then do your best. Inevitably, though, when dealing with historical material, you'll have to choose between one person's account and another. Hopefully it's an informed choice, but it's a choice nonetheless. And simply in making those judgement calls, you impose your own viewpoint on events. A viewpoint that will be seen as "inaccurate" by those whose own viewpoint or research may differ.

In crafting a story, you also have to choose which events to depict at all, and which to leave out. Again, it's a choice that, one way or the other, imposes an interpretation. Ideally, you end up with something that has a sort of integrity and authenticity, even without being 100% complete. As I write this (in November 2020) season 4 of The Crown, the high-end, high-quality Netflix series by Peter Morgan is getting dragged hard in the media for supposed historical inaccuracy, with some even denouncing it as "pure fiction," which is silly. It's not as if it's about Charles and Diana solving crimes or fighting zombies; it's about them getting married, and not very happily. Royal observers can bicker over the details, but that certainly sounds like a true story to me. The show has historians and advisors on staff (who I'm sure have their own heated debates about what's correct) and all things considered, I'm more inclined to trust them than I am the tabloids, the apologists, or the Royals themselves. Would you believe a show endorsed by any of those camps?

I'm reminded of an interview I read with Aaron Sorkin a decade ago, when The Social Network was released and similarly attacked. In its defence, Sorkin asserted that everything in the film was something somebody swore to in a deposition. It stuck in my memory, because it really boils the problem down to its essence: in a story that depicts a contentious lawsuit, you're by nature dealing with people whose versions of events disagree. So who do you believe? As a storyteller, you have to choose, alienating those on the other side. Or you try to average out the differing perspectives, potentially alienating everyone.

And please don't think this only applies to creative non-fiction. "Real" historians do the same thing. In recent years, our culture has finally begun to catch up to the various ways that some voices have been deprioritized in our history, if not erased completely. Two Generals, while popular in schools, is too personal and narrative-driven to have been intended to be used as a history textbook, but even history textbooks are themselves narratives, written by people with their own own personal, cultural, or historical biases. The experience of creating Two Generals has made me forever wary of claims of objectivity.

It's often said that history books (or movies, TV shows, etc.) tell us more about the time in which they were written than the time that they're written about. Indeed, they do. Years after finishing Two Generals, I encountered this quote from American folklorist and anthropologist Henry Glassie, which sums it up nicely, and has informed all of my interactions with historical material since:

"History is not the past, but a map of the past drawn from the present to be useful to the modern traveller."

Moments in time are gone forever. Reconstructing them, even when records exist, is complicated and messy work. Two Generals represents my best attempt to recreate some moments my grandfather and others lived through. I learned what I could, and I certainly know more than anybody currently living about this one man's experiences during WWII. But in the end, they aren't my experiences. I tried to draw a map of them that was accurate, useful, and true as I understand them. But the map is not the territory, and never will be.

So give The Crown a break, because it's a damn good show.

UPCOMING APPEARANCES

Saturday, June 28th, I'll be signing in beautiful Stratford, Ontario at Fanfare Books, which is actually my local independent bookstore. Nothing beats a signing you can walk to in under ten minutes! Come hang out...downtown Stratford is always hopping on summer weekends, especially with the Festival in full swing.

No other dates to announce for the moment, but I'm planning a mini driving tour of eastern Canada that's starting to take shape. If you're a retailer in Montreal, Quebec City, Fredericton, St. John, or Charlottetown, reach out and let me know if you want me to pop in during the first week or two of August.

Hope to see you all somewhere out there on the road. Cheers!

Justice League of News Tidbits

It's been about a month since my last post, and while I still can't talk publicly about my current project (which is barrelling along like a runaway train, FYI) there's nonetheless a bunch of other bits of news to share, which I'll assemble here as a sort of news tidbit crossover team-up event:

THE CAPTIVE PRINCE Re-RELEASE DATE

The third Three Thieves book, The Captive Prince, will be back in stores October 28. It continues to be exciting watching this series roll back out into the world, finding new readers and pleasing old ones who could no longer find copies. People continue to email me asking where they can find the books, but now I have something to tell them, which is a relief. My friends at Papercutz deserve all the thanks we can give them for putting out these new editions. Like the first two volumes, this one will contain new supplemental material, including sketches, in-progress art, and a new installment of the ongoing interview between myself and comics editor/journalist/scholar Irene Velentzas, in which I spill all manner of behind-the-scenes secrets.

Speaking of behind-the-scenes, here's a five minute video I recorded for a virtual Library Con event back in November, about the rerelease of Tower of Treasure. I talk about the history of the series and what inspired it, and you'll get a few glimpses of my office/studio/workspace. Forgive the audio volume, which is a bit all over the place (the result of recording some of it on my phone and the rest using a proper microphone.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_apRLBSN9mg

Bix anniversary

Want even more videos? April 28th is the fifth anniversary of the release of my experimental graphic biography Bix, about the short life of the doomed jazz pioneer Bix Beiderbecke. Not one of my better-known books, unfortunately (having been released five weeks into the first Covid lockdown) but nonetheless the one I'm most proud of, and that I feel best represents my work.

Here's a 40-minute video I recorded at the time (once again with perennial interviewer/career booster Irene Velentzas) that was meant to replace the spotlight panel that didn't happen at that spring's cancelled Toronto Comic Arts Festival. It's a deep dive into how the book "works" and the mechanics of the comics medium in general, so if you're a process junkie like I am, you've come to the right place.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HdVUCWh-Mc

Beyond The Process

Want a more current interview? I've done a bunch recently, but the best has been with Shane White over at Beyond the Process. It's behind a paywall, so you'll need a prescription to read the whole thing. Lots of good advice there, though, for creative professionals new and old. Here's a taste, answering a question about how long-time creators can stay relevant. (If it's not clear by now, I relish opportunities to have meaningful conversations rather than the usual "when does your book come out and how did you get the idea for it?" type of media interview.)

Upcoming Appearances

I don't get invited to that many events in the U.S. even at the best of times, but as mentioned elsewhere, I've cancelled the few appearances I had scheduled there for 2025 and won't be accepting more for the foreseeable future. I'm sure you understand why.

That said, I'll still be signing or speaking anywhere that will have me in Canada or elsewhere around the world. You can always keep up with where I'll be over at my website's "tour" page, which I try to make sure gets updated with new stuff as it gets firmed up.

I've got a unique one coming up: Guelph, Ontario's The Bookshelf, a very cool indie cinema/bookstore, is hosting a screening of the film adaptation of Chester Brown's graphic memoir Paying for It, with director Sook-Yin Lee and Brown himself in attendance for a Q&A. In collaboration with The Dragon, it will also include a sort of mini-con with an impressive line-up of Ontario comics creators (including your truly) on hand. Come out on April 26th, see the film, buy a book or two, get them signed, and chat with some terrific cartoonists.

See you there?