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Advice for Illustrators * ADVICE FOR ILLUSTRATORS
Well, who am I to give advice on anything, really? I'm no Jim Lee or Masume Shirow. You feel free to offer me advice on my advice. I'm not the last word on anything. However, I do know one thing. Sunscreen. Use it. Everything else I say here is opinion and speculation based upon my own experience or song lyrics. Everyone and their brother's son's parrot will try to give you advice on how to draw and how to get work. For the most part, you just have to figure it out for yourself. But above all else, never forget the importance of sunscreen. Dávid Kolodny-Nagy -DKN- madbeanz@hotmail.com |
DRAWING FOR YOURSELF VS. DRAWING FOR SOMEONE ELSE
One of the greatest adjustments an illustrator has to make in his life is making the transition from drawing for himself to drawing for someone else. If you're drawing for yourself you can go wild and draw any character, in any style that makes you happy. If you're an in-betweener working for an animation studio then you need to stick to your model sheets as if they were tattooed into the very fiber of your being.
Those are two extreme situations. For the majority of work in comics or magazines, the amount of freedom an illustrator has is somewhere in the middle. I'm more familiar with comic books so I'll talk about that. You do have a lot of freedom with comic books but you generally can't take a character like Lady Death and draw her so she looks like a Smurf. You may think the character looks better the way you've drawn her and maybe she does. J BUT (it's a big but) DON'T. At least not if you're starting out and want to get published. The creators of the character will feel violated- as if you simply discarded all their ideas and hard work. Series creators feel that they know their characters best and hand over their characters to new illustrator the way overprotective parents hand over their children to a new babysitter. They pretend to leave but then look over your shoulder every second to see what you're doing. That's probably why independent comic book creators are often the sole illustrator of their works.
You should try to use the previous model sheets of a character when you illustrate their book. However, you can not simply trace the character line for line and add no innovations of your own. You would also be doing yourself a disservice and stifling your creativity. Express your own style and get some of your own special flourishes into the comic (within reason). If the only way you can draw Lady Death is as a Smurf then maybe you should be working for Hanna-Barbara.
It is easy to be upset who creators who don't like the way you draw their characters. Just try to see things from their perspective. These characters are their children. Many of them have no lives so their characters actually are the closest things they will ever have to kids. They have invested years of energy, blood, swear and tears in order to 'perfect' these characters. The last thing they want is for them to be (-gasp-) corrupted!!! At least not until they have sold out, but that's another story.
