As I was playing around, I started working on basic sketches of Theophile Brunelle, one of the key characters in the Lafontaine Wolf story. As I got into it, I tried out basic tools like "Select," Copy/Paste," and Layers, which allowed me to quickly iterate on the design. Once I found a form I liked I was able to copy it quickly and try out different beard and ear shapes... then pick and choose what I liked, copy/paste, and put them together.

All of this would be possible with analog tools as well (so far), using pens/pencils and trace paper, but the speed that I was able to work at was great, as well as features like undo, changing colors, etc. I'm really excited to start learning what the app can actually do, and from there use the tool in ways that I can effectively control.

Quick note on the sketches: This is not best practices, I was working from memory based on the actual photo of Theophile and Emma Brunelle. As a preliminary design, I'm happy with the sketch/doodle, but when it's time to do more serious design I will definitely to have the reference photo front and center.

I understand the logic behind it, but there's so much stuff that I'm uncovering that I never knew it could do... simply by virtue of not knowing where to look. The following posts will have some examples.

I have now moved on to Course 3: Make, Smudge, and Erase Marks. And have been learning the controls by playing with a charcoal brush.

On top of that, not only are there tons more gesture controls than I knew existed, but they can be customized to taste.

It's the story of a francophone community that was deeply divided, and the circumstances that finally united them. It's the story of how a wolf, believed to be possessed by a demon or the devil himself, terrorized the community for 18 months... attacking every night, indiscriminately, turning the community into something more like a military camp.

It's a story of my people, the Métis people, and an attempt to carve out a place in the world.

It's a story that I've grown up with (my family is directly responsible for the French cultural festival that takes place there now annually, "Le Festival de Loup" [Festival of the Wolf]), but never really known. My French has never been great, so every year during "Festival" I skipped out on the storytelling night, because I never understood what was going on.

This project came out of a different idea, one in which I wanted to create a comic to update awareness of Marshallese cultural stories, given how many of those students I serve and my desire to understand their culture. That got me asking though, do I have the right to tell their stories? Whose stories do I have the right to tell?

And finally, maybe I should tell my own stories first.

Which brings me back to Le Loup de Lafontaine. A story I've always known. A story I've never really known.

Step one was finding a version I could understand. Like I said, my French isn't great. So I reached out to my Aunt, who is a translator, and who still holds a seat on the Festival committee.

She said they looked into getting it translated at one point, but it was deemed too cost prohibitive. No English translation exists... though many French interpretations do, including videos, stage plays, and orchestral arrangements. Who knew? I was stuck. I'd never really know the story without a decent translation.

Enter the boogyman of 2023, ChatGPT. As a thought experiment, I started pasting sections of the story to see if it could translate it. It was written in 1955, so it has some archaic terms and formatting. In a win for potentially good uses of the software, it was indeed able to make meaning. So I processed the whole story through it. Naturally there were some things it couldn't handle, but it took me from translating a 40 page book myself down to interpreting a few key words and phrases here and there, and updating some syntax issues.

I'm happy to say that the second draft of the English translation has been sent off to review, and maybe it won't be so cost prohibitive after all.

Comic book checklist:

Step 1: create the first ever English translation of an important cultural artifact - DONE

Step 2A: Scripting

Step 2B: Visual Development

Step 3: Layouts

My wife has been taking pottery courses at the Community Creative Center for the past three months, and saw that they were offering a drawing session for the next six weeks. So far that's been the closest thing to a community so I signed up. I've never actually had a drawing fundamentals class before (I started with painting in high school since I switched from engineering at semester) so I figured it's the perfect opportunity to get some official training.

I have to be honest, I can't remember the last time I set aside TWO WHOLE HOURS just to draw. It was wonderful. I wish I had more time during the week, but for now two dedicated hours a week is two hours more than I've been able to manage for the past decade.

I also realized that I've been working at way to small a scale. This can't be helped with the iPad, of course, but with analog materials, it's a full contact sport.

We used newsprint and charcoal, so the sheets were something in the neighborhood of 20x24 or so. The short end went from my elbow to the tip of the charcoal (that's how I measured the square extents in the drawing).

All the tutorials always talk about using your arm, not just your wrist, but its much easier to understand how to do that when you're working at scale. Something I'm going to try to work on as I do more analog drawings in the future.

We were encouraged to squint to abstract the forms we were looking at, and in doing so I learned a new limitation of my alopecia that I had never known before... that strategy does not work for my. Reason being, it is the aliasing effect of your eyelashes that causes the image to blur and abstract. Without eyelashes, the detail remains the same and I just end up closing off part of my field of view. Plus it feels really awkward and kind of makes my eyes water to hold.

All that to say, I'm going to have to learn to see the shapes through direct observation, no shortcuts. I think that's going to force me to become stronger at it at a faster rate (because there's no shortcut to abstraction) but it was an interesting and niche limitation that I had never experienced or considered before.

This drawing was a discussion of cross contour lines, and the basic shapes that make up pretty much all structural elements in a drawing.

We also discussed how cross contour lines can be built up in areas to delineate shading and other effects, leading to hatching and cross hatching.

This was a ten minute drawing, so I'm pretty happy with how much of the form and detail I got in there in that amount of time.

We thought it was a pretty cool idea, so we decided to implement it with our kids. We have smaller children (2 & 3) so we cut the time down to 10-15 minutes for tiny attention spans.

So far we haven't gone too crazy, opting to get a box of crayons and a box of colored pencils from the art cart, along with a stack of paper.

I get some pretty wild requests from my three year old on requests, and here is her favorite drawing that I've done so far. Each child picked out their costume, and mine was dictated to me:

E1 dressed as a princess, E2 as a ballerina, and daddy is dressed as the big blue guy [sully from Monsters inc]. Pirates are chasing us and they have a purple bird.

The original drawing is colored pencil only, but I recently started another (currently still in progress) that I inked the linework on. I liked the inking effect so much that I scanned the original drawing (agan, could not risk ruining E1's favorite drawing... it's been on the fridge ever since it was made. Everything else cycles out daily), and inked over it in procreate.

It was reminiscent of the work I was doing in the YA lit - Graphic Memoir course, specifically "Remember Your Why" and "Godspeed Josh Freeman" (Will link in another post...?). I think there's definitely space for a hybrid workflow. Frankly, I think that's how [most] professionals work.

Mostly hand drawing, with the composition & coloring done in photoshop and illustrator.

Mostly hand drawing, with the composition & coloring done in photoshop and illustrator.

Initial design and brainstorming is hand drawing. Final project is done in illustrator.

More and more it seems to be that, but also working on all the skills and gaps that I skipped over when it comes to learning to draw in general.

Every time we've sat down in drawing class, the process has allowed me to find flow, and I haven't been able to do that for a long time, so it's something I keep looking for ways to get back to.

I've also identified hand drawing as a weakness of my students at school, something I'm planning on addressing immediately, we're going to be doing hand drawing warmups for the rest of the semester. Selfishly, this nets me more practice time too.

Our task Thursday was to learn about perspective, taking a cue from the "Draw 250 boxes" program available at https://drawabox.com/, I and the students worked on constructing perspectives, and how varying the number and position of vanishing points can affect the drawing.

While drafting typically uses two point perspectives, there's something really relaxing about drawing with three, and the images look very charged (reference the bottom right drawings). I'm planning on actually doing the 250 box challenge this summer.

I'd never done this sort of thing before, but let me tell you, I am a fan. After inputting some session preferences (in this case, 30 minute session, fully clothed, all genders, adults), the website presents you with some warmup poses at about 10 seconds per, then some 30 second poses, etc. etc. until it culminates with a 10 minute pose (the ballerina in this session... i drew her twice in the allotted time)

My drawings from this session follow the sheets in general from top to bottom, with the bottom sheet having all of the "long" poses.

According to various sources, a typical gesture session should last 2-3 hours, and the class settings can schedule up to 6 (it builds in breaks). The fact that I can do a thirty minute session makes it possible to schedule this sort of thing a bit more regularly though.

Week three's project was a still life focusing on value and form. It's the first session that I spent the entire time on a single drawing, and I'm happy with how it turned out.

Taking the opportunity to really look at something was really helpful, as was trying to catch the nuances of light and shadow.

Not to brag too much, but I was the only person in class who attempted the still life with the lantern, there was another option that had an empty flower pot instead (you can see them clipped to the board). I'll be honest, that sucker was difficult, trying to get the feel of transparency by really playing with the values and crispness of the elements through the glass, but I'm proud of myself for doing it. I'm also really happy with how the texture on the basket turned out, though it is difficult to see at this distance.

This week was one that I definitely embraced that aspect. While I have found that my knowledge of construction and gesture need a lot of work, especially with living subjects, I do not have a fear of perspective drawings that are apparently common with other beginning illustrators at my level.

Frankly, I fell in love with constructed perspectives in school, they're a very calming experience.

So in the case of today's work, I decided to work on a new skill, skipping the one- and two-point perspective drawings and instead worked on the three-point perspective drawing exercises from draw-a-box. Just messily layering three point boxes on top of one another, seeing if I could figure out how to manipulate the form through vanishing point placement and scale.

Originally my plan was that this would allow me to compare the distortion (which it did) but it also worked to create a cool abstract arial view of a city or something.

That inevitably leads me to the next step in the three point perspective process - figuring out the height. In two-points you just set it relative to the horizon line, it's going to take further research for this one.

The highly detailed one on the top left is the initial drawing, then I started timing myself to capture the forms similar to the class style posing from line of action.

Initially we were going to do something similar today, with variable pose times, but we ended up doing more of a 15 minutes per pose thing since it was our first time.

I'll tell you, it was a real challenge working from life vs. working from a photo. The photo is flat and static, so things don't shift slightly when you look away. It was a good challenge though, and I really enjoyed it.

So much so that I've signed up for the figure drawing class that is next session!

Also, as someone who has no hair myself, I find that I like drawing interesting hair. Glasses too. You can tell because for whatever reason I felt it was important to include both to complete the poses.

Basically, where I was in the room was at the back and side for multiple poses, and it was again when we set her up with the stool, but then they said we were free to move around and reposition... which they never said we couldn't, but it reminded me of our tendency to stay put or wait for permission to act.

All in all, very happy with my progress.

While I still intend to continue working towards that skill, as I've indicated in my check-ins and posts, It became something else in the end.

In the classes I teach, I emphasize the importance of hand drafting and sketching as a skill that needs to be maintained, warning that design is first done by hand and then refined in the computer. The digital is just a tool.

When I reflect at the the outset of this project, I set out to learn a tool... but what became revealed to me was the gaps that I had in my own skill set. It doesn't really matter how well you know a tool if you don't have the skills to manipulate it.

I've spent the last few weeks really honing in on those skills, and learning how to refine them. Specifically gesture, construction, and value. As I practice and build those even further, I can start to take them back in to the digital drawing tools and use both to grow my skill set even further.

I think there's something really telling in the comparison between the very first boxy interpretation of Theophile wayyyy back at the beginning of this padlet, and the life and form in the figure sketches from this week.

I've come a long way. Not in the way I'd planned, but in the way I needed to. I found flow again, and have rekindled a love for drawing that I'd honestly written off as inaccessible forever. I look forward to the next steps.

That being the case, here is the results of my last drawing session for this class at the CCC... and probably the last one for a while. I was informed that I am currently the only person signed up for figure drawing, and we need a minimum of four for the class to "make."

I already have a plan B, though. The time that I would be at the class, 2 hours every monday, will be spent doing a 2 hour class session on lineofaction.com, so all set there.

Looking at everything all together, I'm really happy with how far I've come in this class, and it's been especially helpful to see the effect setting aside the time to focus on my skills has had. If this is what I can do in six weeks, I can't wait to see where I'm at in a few more months.

Oh, and our model also asked me if she could take a picture of my drawings so she could have a copy of them, which gave me a solid confidence boost.

Tonight went with a ball point pilot ink pen, so no erasing.

This was a 10 minute pose