Alex Heizer

In today’s fast food world, consumers are trained to expect more, more, more and the ever-popular MORE!! The result is an unnatural insatiability that is never satisfied or fulfilled. This overindulgent mindset doesn’t only apply to obesity-producing diets, but also to ADHD-contributing sensorial stimuli. With modern movies, television, games and comics filling viewer’s eyeballs with more and more brightly-colored, frenetically-moving eyecandy, our brains are unable to take it all in, let alone process it. And forget processing, it’s often difficult to simply know where to look. The point gets lost in all the visual shrapnel. In my last blog post, I mentioned browsing through some comic GNs and manga and seeing a lot of artistic mistakes. One of them (although less-so with manga) is that they sometimes subscribe to the “More is better and WAY more is WAY MORE BETTER!!!” philosophy. While this seems like a good idea, here’s why it’s not.

As an artist, it’s your job to create something which communicates. However, when the amount of stuff placed into your field of vision increases, your focus and comprehension decreases. In other words, a panel full of lines and objects ends up just that — a panel full of lines and objects. Where does your eye go? All around the panel. Even the main character gets lost in the clutter. Once this happens communication stops, unless the idea you are trying to communicate is how emotionally draining 20 pages of overload is. While some artists like Shirow Masamune and R. Crumb do this intentionally to make a point, overall their work maintains a clear focus. Within the static overload they make the reader see the main message. Learning how to emphasize the main figure (which may be a person, object or movement in a panel) will make your artwork communicate more effectively and you’ll be more successful than even many of the currently published books.

There are a few ways of accomplishing this in your own work.

1. Line quality. This means using heavier or finer lines to differentiate your objects. It can be as easy as using heavier lines for objects in the forefront, or as subtle as using solid lines for objects that should receive focus and sketchier lines for objects which should recede.

2. Value. An easy way to think of this is lightness or darkness. It’s easy to make an object pop off the page if it’s white and you color the background black. It may not make an interesting comic though, unless you have the storytelling skills of Will Eisner. But the idea is, brighter objects will pop to the forefront while more muted objects will recede.

However, you can also use tricks like drawing your object in black lines and secondary objects in greys. This way you’re using different values to achieve the same effect.

3. Color temperature. Since two different hues may have the same value, sometimes you’ll need to consider working with color temperatures rather than values if you’re working in color. Color temperature just means whether a given color is “hot” or “cold”, and it is subjective based on the surrounding colors. For example, alizarin crimson may be a very hot color by itself on a white page, but put next to neon green cools off quite a bit.

Masters like Frank Frazetta used color temperature to great advantage when creating works which read clearly. Many graphic novels lose their focus and become muddy due to the limited palette used. They think to look cool it’s got to be dark and fiery. Although they are using an incredibly limited value range, the fact that they are also using a limited temperature range is what makes the artwork lose focus. One GN I saw used mostly browns, oranges and reds, but then the greens and blues were muted, less saturated. When you pulled back and looked at the page overall it looked like a mud puddle.

4. Sharpness. This is something that photographers take advantage of every day, but most artists hardly ever use. in fact, I’ve rarely seen it used outside of painters with fine art training and some independent comic creators. Manipulating a scene’s depth of field, as it’s called in photography, allows you to lead your viewer subconsciously to what you want them to notice.

More than just “blurring out” a background, it involves creating a sense of volume and space by reducing the sharpness of secondary objects, regardless of whether they are behind, in front of or on the same visual plane as your main object. You can accomplish this even when only using black ink, as Tsutomu Nihei does so excellently in the manga Biomega. In this case, the artist uses varying line quality to create depth of field and a location in space for the characters.

5. Composition. By using any of the standard composition layouts you can instantly make a panel more readable. The Golden Mean, Rule of Thirds and perspective all allow you to subconsciously lead your viewer’s focus to the exact point you want to emphasize. Using perspective and the triangular placement of objects within a panel, as artists like Da Vinci did with The Last Supper, will draw your readers’ eyes to where you want them to go. Also using these composition rules when arranging panels on the page, you can lead the reader through your entire story more clearly. Manga artists tend to do this more effectively than American comics artists, and their varied page layouts work really well in guiding the reader quickly and easily through the book.

By putting a bit of thought into your work you can effectively lead your viewers to see what you want them to see, and lead their eyes through the page in an orderly way. Creating focus allows you to communicate more easily, making the reading experience more enjoyable.