Warrior Lady encounters the dreaded Bridge of Death.
Hope you had an enjoyable February.
Now For Something Completely Different
Category: Art
Sugar and Spike
Having old comic books can serve as a doorway to old memories dating from childhood. You can’t get that from today’s magazines. Many comics nowadays are over-hyped, overly violent along with a generous dollop of overt sexuality. They are aimed at young adults rather than pre-adolescents as they often were when I was a child. Tied in with blockbuster movie franchises now, they are milked relentlessly for their money making capacities rather than fueling the fantasies of readers. Even the formerly innocuous Archie comics have developed a darker tone and the artwork has lost the charm of yesteryear, either the art looking amateurish or attempting to match the ‘realism’ of the major comics such as Marvel or DC. An advertisement splash for the Riverdale tv series on Netflix looks more like something for Children of The Corn, rather than the humorous teen-age hijinks of the fifties, sixties and seventies.
What a far cry from the bright, optimistic plotlines and artworks I can recall. Archie comics were always fun to read, not anything you needed worrying about getting nightmares from. Even DC and Marvel portrayed the heroes endlessly battling against villains and usually winning. If they didn’t win, all was not lost as you could count on a rematch between the good guys and the bad guys.
A favorite I can recall was an odd little comic series put out by DC comics, called Sugar and Spike.
Written and drawn by Sheldon Mayer, it depicted the antics of a pair of toddlers name Sugar Plum and Cecil ‘Spike’ Wilson. When adults listened to the tots, all they heard was ‘Glx’ or ‘Blox’. But when Sugar and Spike spoke to each other or to other babies (both human and animal) they were perfectly articulate, speaking a baby language all their own. Sheldon modeled their mischief making on the behavior of his own toddler children, creating a delightfully clever off-kilter comic which was successfully published for many years.
Sheldon Mayer is also responsible for Superman being the well-known icon he is today.
The story is that he came across Siegel and Shuster’s unsold Superman comic strip which delighted him enough, so he touted it towards his employer Max Gaines who finally took it up and got it published in the iconic Action #1 comic published in June 1938. The rest, naturally, is history.
Sheldon began illustrating Sugar and Spike in 1956 with the stipulation only he could write the stories and draw the mischievous toddlers, an arrangement that would never fly today in the present corporate environment. His quirky humor permeates the entire comic consistently throughout the series. He even signed his own artwork as can be seen in the corner of the lower right hand panel.
Other characters were added, as time went on. Bernie the Brain, an infant super-genius, was one, allowing the kids an opportunity to play with his wacky inventions (and get into all sorts of trouble naturally), or provide explanations about the baffling behavior of the adults in their world. Their creator was consistently able to maintain the lighthearted plots without any loss of quality.
Sheldon continued producing his comics until cataracts forced him to stop for a time. By the time he had surgery to correct the issue, and resumed drawing, the industry had changed. While he continued drawing Sugar and Spike until his passing in 1991, these issues were published overseas, with only a few of the stories being reprinted in the USA. Arrgh! What a loss!
No one has been able to successfully replicate Sheldon’s work on Sugar and Spike, a product of his unique creativity and sense of humor. DC comics has recently produced an version of Sugar and Spike, showing them all grown up and running a very peculiar detective agency which “handles problems and mysteries that the superheroes can’t handle themselves”. Needless to say, all the original charm is gone, smothered under a distasteful layer of cynical edgy scripting.
I’ve long since read my few copies of the original Sugar and Spike to pieces many decades ago, so will be keeping an eye out at flea markets and yard sales in the hopes of acquiring back issues at a cheap price. These little gems are well worth the getting.
Hope you all had a happy Thanksgiving, or as Sugar and Spike would say; “Glyx, blox, snzx!”
Foot Work
One of the toughest parts of the human anatomy to draw for me is the foot. Getting those toes, nails, heels and arches to look right is tricky. This is why many art instruction books show the bones underlying not only the human form but that of any animal. There’s really no way around it. To get the outer part looking right, you need to know what lies beneath.
The human foot is made up of 26 bones, 30 joints, and more than 100 muscles, ligaments and tendons. No wonder the darn things are so hard to draw!
Our feet are highly specialized because they help us accomplish that amazing balancing act known as walking upright.
Our habit of walking on our heels and toes to do this is referred to as plantigrade locomotion. Other animals also use this method such as other apes and monkeys, raccoons, opossums and bears.
The above photo was taken by one of my brothers, showing an excellent bear paw print in new fallen snow with his hunting glove beside it to give some scale. Bears can also manage the trick of standing up on their hind legs and walking a bit, but this is not their preferred mode of walking.
Other four-legged animals have differently shaped feet, depending on their own style of walking. Cats and dogs, for example, don’t walk plantigrade as we do. Instead, they use the digitigrade form of locomotion. This involves walking on their toes. Many people do not realize that their pets literally tip-toe about. If you look at the ‘toe beans’ on the bottom of a cat’s paw, you’ll see the row of toe pads and underneath them is a pad which actually covers what for us would be the ball of the foot. The heel is further up on what many people take to be part of the leg but is really the foot of the animal. This photo of a kangaroo makes this a little clearer.
Like us, the kangaroo has a highly specialized foot. When at rest they are plantigrade like we are. But when they begin hopping, they rise up on their toes. Interestingly when they move at a slow walk, they use their large tails as an extra ‘leg’.
Hoofed animals, like horses or deer, carry the digitigrade form to an extreme. They don’t just walk or run about on their toes. They actually walk about on their toe tips. Hooves are just highly modified toenails. Ballerinas, eat your hearts out!
My art efforts for the foot are modest to say the least, even with the use of gestural drawing, which is useful for starting out, while learning to master the form of your subject. As always, practice makes perfect, so it’s a good idea to stock up on sketch books, so you can observe the evolution of your own drawing style. In addition to art anatomy instruction books, here are many tutorials on You-Tube to follow, to help you draw better looking feet.
Happy drawing!
Medieval Art
With the garden finally planted and growing, thoughts of artwork return. While my art instruction books focus on present day art styles, I find it both interesting and helpful to look back at the art of previous centuries.
Medieval paintings and drawings are always worth studying. While the artwork looks crude and even amateurish by today’s standards, I think that’s an unfair assessment. With the collapse of the Roman Empire, whatever schools or art styles were being taught likely vanished for the most part to be replaced by the art of the Germanic barbarians who moved in with their own traditions and set up shop. Absorbing the bits and pieces of what the Romans left, the budding new nations of Europe began developing their own style.
The lack of perspective is often remarked on. The figures on the castle ramparts seem way out-sized compared to the castle itself and the tents in the background nearly as big as the castle itself. But perspective wasn’t the goal here. The action itself was, so all players in this drama had to be seen clearly with their roles in the battle apparent along with their status, indicated by their mode of dress. Interest in any realistic perspective didn’t show up until the Renaissance.
Views of everyday life can be found in countless illustrations.
This image from the Hunterian Psalter, an illuminated prayer book from 12th century England shows a family performing their chores. The wife uses a drop spindle for weaving yarn while the husband digs with his shovel in the field (barefoot no less!). At the wife’s feet sits a cradle with a placid faced infant firmly swaddled.
While the figures were meant to illustrate moral lessons or incidents from the Bible, they were drawn from ordinary life. Below is an image also from the Hunterian Psalter showing wine being produced.
Wine pressing must be hard work as the wine stomper appears unclad and looks like he is sampling some of the unfinished product to quench his thirst at the same time.
The next picture is from the Luttrell Psalter, showing sheep penned up, perhaps being sheared, while two women carrying water vessels pass by.
The Luttrell Psalter, from the early fourteenth century, is famous for its countless illustrations of everyday life. Some of the drawings, though, are definitely out of the ordinary depicting demons, strange animals and odd grotesques of every sort.
Here we have two gray faced beings battling each other, one getting a pot smashed over his head, perhaps a moralistic admonition by the artist about the evils of drinking. Other figures range from a spunky bishop pinching the nose of a demon,
to creatures so odd, it’s hard to make out what the illustrator was portraying.
One thing’s for certain, there was no lack of imagination and talent in the Middle Ages. One could do worse than to look at these colorful and often whimsical images for sources of artistic inspiration.
Happy drawing!
More Pencil Drawings
One of the challenges of artwork is illustrating the human face. One can always draw cartoons or caricatures but a natural looking face is much more challenging.
The above sketch by me, based on a drawing from a tutorial book, is an example of chiaroscuro, a method of using contrast between light and dark to produce an image. It involves the use of shadows to create a realistic image, giving a two-dimensional face the illusion of depth. It’s not as easy as you might think. It took multiple tries before I got a drawing I was satisfied with.
What if you want to draw portraits? Especially recognizable ones? That’s definitely tricky. You need to have a good working knowledge of facial proportions. Many people think they know what a face looks like but when they try translating their ‘knowledge’ into an art work, they usually wind up creating something like this.
Not a bad drawing really, but how many people do you know who actually look like that? Carrie Stuart Parks in her excellent book The Secrets Of Drawing Realistic Faces points out that people often try drawing what they think they see, rather than what is actually there. A forensic artist doing composite drawings for police departments for identifying criminals, it’s important for her as an artist to produce an accurate image. She writes that people often try to draw what they think faces look like which doesn’t really match the image of the person they have in mind. To get a realistic portrait, you need to understand what the proportions of the face are and how to set it down on paper. Once you’ve mastered the basics then you can proceed on to the details.
Rendering parts of the face such as eyes, nose and mouth are where chiaroscuro comes in. In the drawing immediately above, the facial features are drawn in as lines but that not how a person’s face actually looks. Rather, what we do see is a combination of light and shadow. So, the above nose which looks like the letter U with two little knobs attached, winds up looking like this.
The only lines I drew were for the nostril holes and the edges of the nostrils on either side. All else (except for the eyes) is shading. Here is where the blending stump and tortillons come into their own. By using the graphite from the nostrils, I used the stump to create the shadow of the nose itself as well as the shading on the tip of the nose. Still not quite perfect but a much more accurate rendition of a human nose. If you need extra graphite or charcoal, just take a piece of scrap paper and using a 4B or 6B pencil put down a layer to rub the blender or tortillon into for extra shading material.
The same with the mouth. A simple line with ‘commas’ making a smile become this.
The only line I drew was the mouth itself where the lips meet. All else is shading. Again, not perfect as I made the upper lip darker than I intended but far more realistic.
Finally, the eye.
This is the trickiest one as you have to be careful not to overdo the eyelashes and make your model look like he’s wearing heavy duty mascara. The edges of the eyelids framing the eye are shaded in rather than drawn. The iris and pupil are drawn but you have to be careful to keep the upper and lower parts hidden so the eye doesn’t look like it’s popping in horror. Use a kneaded eraser to create the highlight in the pupil and iris to give the eye a more life-like appearance.
There are plenty of tutorials on YouTube for achieving realistic faces. So, grab your pencils, eraser and blending stumps and play around with it a bit. See you next month!
