Thursday, January 21, 2010

The Butcher's Unfinished Symphony

Well, this blog has been named 'Run. Draw. Write' for a while now, so I thought I better actually put up some drawings at some point.
Right now I'm trying to do minimum 1 hour drawing a day, I've been working largely on anatomy for the past 3 months, so most of it is just poor copies of renaissance masterpieces.

Anyway, going back into my Garage days, I've been running with 'The Real Gayle King' which is our filthy euphemism for the even filthier combination of Butcher, Harvard and 150pages.

In order to get to know eachothers creative styles, if you may permit my narcissism, I suggested we take turns at collaborating. Butcher and I could do a comic, Hwang and 150 could do whatever they want.

We got off to a great start, that is what I had envisioned as a manageable 4 page comic immediatly blew out into an epic poetic, nightmarish comic of comical proportions.

all rights reserved.

Don't get me wrong, I was incredibly impressed with Butcher's enthusiasm and ownership of the project, if anything it was a bit daunting and whilst the man has vision, there's no denying it I couldn't help tears from coming to my eyes when he replied to my suggestion of '3 panels per page' with 'Okay I want like the next page to have 100 panels filled with all sorts of people over history holding guns so the reader goes like 'woah'' and stuff.

mercifuly he didn't tell me what to fill the panels with so I got away with 5

It was a bittersweet experience, for one having butcher say 'I love it! I love your artwork BUT just if you could change this, this, this, this and this it will be better.' and 'exactly you nailed it, but I changed my mind!'



In the end I killed the project, being nasty and justifying it to myself as 'tough love'. Put simply I couldn't cut the demanding pace Butcher was setting for me.

Anyway, here's the drawings without captions, I must have grown as an artist since I did these 6ish months ago, because I can't believe how poor they are. Hopefully I've grown... otherwise I'm just a shitty artist.

I'd like to work with Butcher on a comic again some day, but I wouldn't use the to & fro process we did here. I think probably doing a 'panel at a time' comic is always going to produce stories of the same literary merit as 'word at a time' stories in theatresports.

I have captioned images around somewhere, maybe butcher will post those on his blog.

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