I’m going to make an admission: I have no idea what “plot” means. It confuses me. Some movies are supposedly tightly plotted, others are supposedly plot-less. Personally, I find “plot” to be totally useless when trying to figure out how to tell a story. Instead, I prefer to focus on what every story has in common.

Every story, whether action, comedy, slice-of-life, or abstract will build tension and then release that tension at a certain point. That’s it.

You’ve probably seen a graph like this before:

from catchyourhare.com

That’s all you need to know about telling a story. So how do you build tension?

Start with a small event, followed by a bigger event, and finish with a really big event. Kung Fu Hustle is a great example of a very simple version of this structure. It’s nothing more than a series of fights and comic moments that get progressively bigger and more absurd as time progresses, until the final moment culminates with a decisive end of the escalation.

We're just getting started.

Don’t worry about inciting incidents, don’t worry about story beats, just start with a small event and follow it up with bigger events until you come to an event that finishes it all. This even works scene to scene too. Every little part of your story should follow the same pattern, as long as the resolutions to the little stories build toward the overall big story.

This even works for stories that are slow, minimalistic or sparse. It just happens much more subtly, and the climaxes are smaller (although not necessarily less powerful). Case in point is Ozu’s Late Spring. While the events are quotidian, they build toward a powerful tension that is released with the final subtle moments of the film. Paul Schrader’s Transcendental Style In Film is an in-depth description of how this works with “quieter” stories. While he refers to “codas” and “human density” he’s basically just describing the same process; build tension and then, release it.

The emotional climax of Late Spring.

Even a movie like Baraka, that isn’t even really a story, follows the same pattern. It’s a series of seemingly unrelated, but beautiful images from around that world that tie together thematically as the film progresses. The culmination is a collection of disturbing images of genocide and violence, interspersed with dark Japanese performance art, followed by a visual harmony that suggests a unification of all the images that have come before. While its quality is more musical than narrative, it still builds and releases.

The fun thing about telling stories is that there are a ton of ways that you can accomplish this, but you don’t need to over-think it! Just make sure the big pie fight is at the end of the movie and not at the beginning and you’re on your way.

Now, having said all this, I think there are some details about how to best do this, but they aren’t hard fast rules, and I can think of exceptions to almost every other element that I think makes a story good. Many of my favorite stories have dynamic characters, interesting turns and compelling stakes, but I have other favorites that do fine without.

But every story, somehow, has to build to something.

Here’s the latest Artcast. Using a modification on a coloring technique I learned over at Ben Caldwell’s forum. It’s the same technique I used to do all of these illustrations:

It seems to be the technique that I always use for pinups. Go figure. Anyway here was the end result of tonight’s artcast:

You can see the full process video below:

Stuff mentioned in the video:

Don Seegmiller

Boo hoo. I forgot to record last Monday’s Artcast. Fortunately, I can still show you what I did. This is a continuation of the painting I started here.

Adding more texture and tone to the face. Working out the eyes.

Adding in a background. The wallpaper pattern is a custom brush I built then varied its alignment and duplicated it across the background.

Adding noise and texture to the background. The texture is a hi-res custom brush.

Adding a flame to the background and some color variation on the wall. Also painting in some reflected light on the suit

The finishing touch.

Voila! Apologies for not recording this. I’m going to be doing a whole different approach to coloring at the Artcast Network screening room, tomorrow night at 9 pm EST. Hopefully that’ll make up for it.

See you there!

I can’t say that I’m the best artist out there, but I’m certainly a better artist than I was when I started this blog. I’ve read a lot of advice about getting better at drawing over the years. Some advice has been very helpful and some advice just hasn’t worked for me. I want to share just a couple of things that have helped me improve, particularly over the last four or five years.

1. Draw a lot. How much is a lot? Malcom Gladwell says its takes about 10,000 hours of doing something to become an expert at it. (I recently did a back-of-the-napkin calculation with my father and we figured he had done over 80,000 hours of surgery!) So the more you do every day, the faster you’ll get good. In 2004, I attended my first San Diego Comic Con, where I nervously showed around my sketchbook to artists I admired. One of these artists was Paul Davies, who recommended that I fill up one sketchbook a month, at minimum. I did just that, several months over, and was amazed at how quickly I progressed over that time. I also recommend that if you have the means, to get a job where you draw. It’s much easier to get in a lot of hours of practice when 8 or more of them are guaranteed everyday.

This is your best friend

2. Slow and Steady. Especially when learning to do cleanup, whether it be with pencil, brush or crow quill, go slowly. It’s just like practicing a musical instrument. You start as slowly as you can without making mistakes, then you speed up. Go as slowly as necessary to have control over what you’re doing on the page. This is particularly important when trying to ink ellipses and other curves freehand. While it’s best to sketch an ellipse in a single quick stroke, I’ve never seen an artist I admire ink an ellipse that way. Most will carefully and deliberately chunk out the ellipse with smaller controlled ink strokes.

Watch how Jake Parker does it:

Inking Missile Mouse from jakeparker on Vimeo.

3. Learn from the best. Another musical analogy. I met a guy once who played the violin in high school. His music teacher gave him this piece of advice: If you want to be first chair, don’t set your sights on first chair, set your sights on the best violinists in the world. Particularly with the ubiquity of information on artists available on the internet, there’s no reason you can’t learn from the best. Find the artists you admire through google or twitter. Start a correspondence with them. Ask them questions. You’ll find many are generous and willing to help. Read what they have to say on their blogs, and watch their video tutorials. The recently launched ArtCast Network is a great place to do this. If you can’t get in touch with an artist you like, then copy their work. Download, or buy high resolution images of their art and practice making exact replicas. When I started learning how to ink, I would download hi-res images of Frank Cho’s art, convert it to blue-line, print it out on Bristol and ink over it trying to copy his line quality. The same can apply to any artist you want to replicate. Look at their art, study it closely and figure out how to replicate it. Just one caution: make sure and give the original artist credit if you show your studies to anyone else.

One of the Frank Cho images I would practice my inking on.

4. Fix it until it’s right. When working on a difficult piece, redraw it until you get it right. Especially if you’re starting out, I recommend using mechanical pencils with a good eraser. They erase easily, and you can re-work and readjust a drawing until you get it right. Set a high standard f0r yourself and work to achieve that with every piece. Look at your drawing in front of a mirror, or flip it around and hold it up to the light. Seeing it in reverse will reveal problems in the drawing. Don’t take this suggestion too far. If you’re really hitting a wall, abandon the drawing, or start over. It’s more important to draw a lot than get stuck on one drawing.

5. Study the Fundamentals. Study the best books and videos on perspective, construction, anatomy, rendering and color theory. I highly recommend the resources found at Gnomon Workshops (Some of the best stuff I found on Gnomon were tutorials by Feng Zhu and Scott Robertson on how to draw a straight line freehand.) Go to live figure drawing classes, weekly, if possible. Go to the zoo every week, or more, if you want to learn to draw animals. Ernest Norling’s Perspective Made Easy will teach you everything you need to know about perspective. Preston Blair’s Cartoon Animation is the best place to get started with construction.  I’m still really searching for is a good book on anatomy. I own several books on anatomy, but none that really satisfies me. If anyone has any recommendations, please contact me.

Buy this book.

6. Repeat until you die. This is probably the most important step. There’s always something new to learn. Thank God! One of the greatest joys of drawing is having those break-through moments that come from constantly challenging yourself. Keep at it. The fun is in the process, not in the prize.

Over the last year or so, I’ve started to use Twitter to get know other artists and other folks interested in animation, comics, and film. I try to post interesting stuff on Twitter that other people will want to read, but every now and again, I will post things that seem totally unrelated to art. I’m particularly fascinated by lightcraft, water bears and earthships, and will post about those things as quickly as I post about anything else.

I do this because I’m a curious guy, and I think curiosity and creativity are linked at the waist. Being fascinated and in awe with the world around you is the quickest way to fill up your creative tank and keep you in the mood to love new ideas as they bubble up from your subconscious.

We all start being curious. It’s thrilling watching my 9 month old daughter as she discovers everything. Every shoe, toy, cupboard and chunk of dirt is new. She’s filling her mind with a fire-hose and her neural network is clicking together like a giant Voltron made of millions of chrome and plastic robot-cats. We were all like that once.

But somewhere along the way, we start putting up barriers to curiosity. The fire-hose slows to a trickle and suddenly Voltron looks like an amputee. We’re left with going-with-the flow-and doing as we’re told.

So what are the barriers that keep us from filling our minds with new ideas, and how can we knock them down?

I think there are two big barriers that really keep us from exploring our world and being more creative.

Barrier 1: Judgment

Back to me posting on Twitter about tardigrades. What if I said to myself, “I shouldn’t be wasting my time looking up info on tardigrades, I need to focus on studying art.” That’s a barrier of judgment. There is an expectation about what is appropriate for us according to our social role.  As a result, doctors should only read about medicine, writers should only read about writing and football players cannot possibly enjoy ballet.

Everyone needs some sort of unstructured play-time where what you do has nothing to do with survival (i.e. paying the bills). While I’ve never been a fan of sports, or even much of an athlete, I started playing soccer with some of the guys at work about a year ago. It’s the highlight of my week, every week. It has absolutely nothing to do with my profession, and it gives me a chance to work my brain (and my body) in ways that I never get to with art.

Stuart Brown says it better than I can in his book Play. Play is about far more than winding-down and diversion. Healthy play can make us more creative and curious about life. And if we can find out how to incorporate play into our work, the results are explosive. The best artists I know, are the ones for whom every day is game. They love drawing, and they’ll do it until they’re blind and have carpel tunnel.

One of the great lessons about judgment I learned from Orson Scott Card’s Literary Boot-camp. Our first day of the workshop we had the assignment to go to a library or bookstore and find a book on a topic we had no interest in. I found myself looking at books on salt mining and medical fraud. At first they didn’t do much for me, but it didn’t take longer than a couple of minutes for me to be totally fascinated by what I was reading. The material from those two books eventually inspired the short story Coney Island that I wrote for the workshop, and eventually adapted into a short film. All I needed was that little push to get past my judgment about what I would or would not find interesting.

Which brings us to the next barrier, which is really four barriers tied into one, and probably the most important barrier for you to face and overcome:

Barrier 2: The Gut Feeling

So even if you can get past judgment and crack open a book that doesn’t interest you, you may find that the book is boring, weird, disturbing or scary and that becomes the end of it. You put it down and move on to something that is more your cup of tea. It makes sense. You’ve got a gut feeling that you don’t like it, and you probably want to make art that is like the stuff you like, so why waste your time?

Here’s why.

If you want to be creative person, and think up actual, original thoughts you have to move outside of your comfort zone. The boring/weird/disturbing/scary signposts are like the skulls and roasted armor that  litter the mouth of the dragon’s cave. They don’t lie. The experience ahead will be uncomfortable, but there’s also a pile of riches available for the knight that’s willing to pass through the fiery vale.

A brief example: In 1913 Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring premiered to crowd that quickly erupted into a riot. It was too dissonant, too dark and too savage. Yet, only years later it was hailed as a masterpiece and even made part of Disney’s Fantasia. What, at one time, was an unbearable piece of art had transformed into a musical classic. Why? Well, obviously it wasn’t the music that changed. So, it had to have been the brains of the listeners. After hearing something unsettling, their brains went to work and formed new connections that made sense of the disorder. Their brains grew to understand the music.  (The whole story is told brilliantly by WNYC’s RadioLab)

This may be going on in your head when you first experience something different.

If you haven’t watched a film by Miyazaki before, chances are you are going to think it’s pretty weird. Bizarre animals, weird magic and a total lack of narrative structure in some of his films. But if you keep watching his movies, they start being less weird, and you start to see the patterns and the logic in what he is doing, and suddenly you have a new way of looking at the world, and an expanded tool chest for solving your own artistic problems.

B/W/D/S experiences do the same to our brains. They are uncomfortable, but they physically change the structure of our brains. Neural connections form where there were previously none before, and suddenly we’re thinking thoughts that we’ve never had before.

Some of my most formative artistic experiences started with an unwanted feeling, and ended with me being a more enlightened artist. The first time I watched Akira I was disturbed, scared and weirded out, but I eventually learned to love Otomo’s grounding of fantastic elements in brutal naturalism. It’s a pillar of what I look for in any sci-fi or fantasy.

On the other extreme, Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story was so boring the first time I watched it, I fell asleep. But in its real-time pacing it captured something so true about family and life, that I’ve never seen it repeated in any other film.

Slowness and boringness in art can be one of the biggest barriers, but it can be extremely rewarding if you’re willing to take it on.

Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami has a great interview where he talks about slowness in art. This is one of my favorite lines: “Some films have made me doze off in the theater, but the same films have made me stay up at night, wake up thinking about them in the morning, and keep on thinking about them for weeks.”

You can watch the full interview here:

Did you get the part about how he was thinking for weeks? As artists, we should search for experiences that make us think – that force us to re-evaluate the world and make new connections. Cozying up with the familiar all the time will never open up those opportunities.

In the end, an artist needs to be creative. To be creative you have to fill your head with novel ideas and then stand back as they form original thoughts. If you’re hindering the process with judgment and impatience you stop the flow and seriously hinder your brain from making steps it needs to come up with that next brilliant idea.

Doing a little bit of digital painting for the artcast today.  You can see the full 2 hour painting here:

Or see the condensed progress below.

The original sketch.

Flating in the colors.

Adding line work.

Adding gradients to the shapes.

Painting in shadows.

Adding texture.

Still a bit more work to do to finish this up. Tune in next week to see the completed piece.

Stuff mentioned in the show:

Adobe Photoshop Custom Brush Techniques with David Levy

Practical Light and Color.

Hans Bacher Here’s his blog. Contact him and see if he can tell you where you can buy his brush library. There’s some great stuff in there.

Here are a couple of quick cockpit and chair designs I did for Nerf N-Strike Elite. Baby seats anyone?

Pablo Picasso: “I paint objects as I think them not as I see them.”

The greatest challenge of anyone trying to tell a story visually is to try and figure how to tell the story. For a comic artist, it’s a question of what do I put in the frame, what is its relationship to other things around it, and how close am I going to be to my subject? For the writer, it’s a question of what do I describe, and which and how many words should I use to do so. For film makers and animators, the questions include motion, sound, and the manipulation of time.

So how do you make your choices? There are an infinite amount of possibilities at any moment of your story, and the human brain is physically incapable of analyzing all of those possibilities and selecting a candidate for the best idea. But the human brain is also very good at generalizing and finding simplified heuristic models to understand how any system works. For artists, this is called a theory.

The thing is, every artist operates on their own theory, whether they know it or not, and depending on their theory, their art will be shallow and unoriginal or deeply profound and unique.  Michael Bay’s theory of film making can be summed up in one question: “Is It Awesome?” It’s a theory based entirely on spectacle and resonance with pop-culture and is a common guide of the novice. The other two novice theories are the “make it different” and “do it like them” theories. Either, you are trying to come up with something that hasn’t been done before, or you are copying something cool you saw someone else do. None of these theories are bad theories, in fact I think the best storytellers follow them to a certain extent, but I also think the very best storytellers have a much more important underlying theory guiding what they do.

And here’s what it is: Empathy.

The best artists know, that at its root, storytelling is about understanding the experiences of someone else.

And the tool that the greats use to create empathy is point-of-view.

In 2002, I had the opportunity of participating in Orson Scott Card’s Writer’s Bootcamp. Previous to the Bootcamp, I was assigned to read Characters & Viewpoint by Mr. Card which discusses the importance of point-of-view and particularly the superiority of the 3rd-person-limited-omniscient-narrator in writing. Like most people I understood point-of-view at a surface level-1st person, 2nd person, 3rd person ect. It just means who is telling the story, right?  But it wasn’t until I was in the workshop that I really understood the importance of point-of-view to telling a story.

He gave us some writing samples to read. They were very descriptive passages of landscapes and sunsets and details of clothing, but they were boring as hell. Why? Because the descriptions were too objective. It was like a robot describing a photograph-there was no humanity to the words. Then we read some other passages that were vibrant, gritty and funny. The difference was point-of-view. The writing communicated an attitude, not just a description. That’s why the 3rd-person-limited-omniscient-narrator is such a powerful tool, because it communicates attitude so well. (For a masterful example of 3PLON, look no further than George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series.)

So, point-of-view is not so much about who is telling the story, but how he sees the world. You don’t even have to limit the narrative to just the things a character thinks and sees, as long as the world you are showing is colored by his attitudes.

The textbook example of using point-of-view is Kurosawa’s Rashomon. You see the same event three different times, from three different perspectives. The details and the feeling of the story are widely different with each telling, depending on the attitudes of who is telling the story at the time.

When the Thief tells his version of the story, it’s all bravado and adventure. When the victim tells the story, it’s nightmarish thuggery, and when the guy hiding in the bush tells the story, we see a pathetic struggle for survival. (By the way, the third act of Rashomon includes the truest fight scene in the history of cinema.)

So, point-of-view is not only an important tool, it’s the most important thing to consider when telling a story, and can better help you decide what artistic decisions to make than any other rubric. If you want to do something awesome, unique or traditional go right ahead, but it’ll be a thousand times more powerful if you can also make it support a specific point-of-view.

Lastly, I want to point you to this clip by Improv Everywhere. If you have the means or the desire, contrast it with the subway scene in Borat. We are seeing the same thing through two very different attitudes. Neither one is “true”, they are simply choices. Ultimately you have the power to choose a point-of-view that will show others how you see the world.

Perhaps that’s the most important choice of all.

Just finished my first regularly scheduled artcast. You can see the whole thing here: (its about an hour long)

If you don’t have an hour you can just see what I did below. I was working on some character designs for a short story I’m working on about a Russian peasant girl that outsmarts the devil.

If you have any comments or suggestions on future shows, please let me know.

So, I gotta say, 2009 was a good year. I can’t say I accomplished a ton, but having baby and publishing my first comic is enough to satisfy me. It’s interesting how focusing on a couple of simple things can really pay off.

With that in mind I wanted to put the word out about what you can expect from yours truly for 2010. Nothing complicated, but here it goes:

1. I’m continuing with comics. I’m working on a story for an anthology, and I’ll start thumb-nailing the next Green Monk graphic novel. It’ll be a much larger story, so I’m looking to 2011 before I actually publish it, but you’ll see much of the work on my blog as I work on it. They’ll be plenty of news about this as the year rolls along.  I’ll also post my concept art work, as I’m able to. You can expect new art a couple of times every week.

2. I’m starting a new feature on my blog called Theory Thursdays. I really enjoy writing about theory, and people seem to like what I write, so I’m going to start doing it every Thursday, starting January 7th. While the theme of the blog posts is theory there will be discussions on process and philosophy of art and storytelling as well. You can see past samples of these types of articles here:

The Jackie Chan Formula

Why I Love Miyazaki

What is Motivation?

Beware the Tortured Artist

3. I’m planning on doing quite a bit of traveling this year, and I’m going to try and hit a lot of conventions around the country.  Here’s a short list of shows I’m looking at:

Staple! — Austin, TX

Stumptown — Portland, OR

PDX — Portland, OR

Kids Read Comics — Dearborn, MI

Toronto Comic Arts Festival — CANADA

Craft Lake City — Salt Lake City, UT

SPX — Bethesda, MD

I’m also considering the Phoenix Comic-Con and doing APE again, but I haven’t decided yet. Let me know if you have any suggestions for other shows I could attend.

4. Last I’m going to start drawing live every Monday at 7pm MST (that’s Utah time). My live show will be available on the ArtCast Network and over Ustream. It’ll cover whatever work I happen to be doing that evening. I’ve run a couple of live tests already, and here’s a little taste of the type of stuff I’ll be working on:

You can stay tuned by adding my blog to your blog reader of choice or following me on twitter. As always, feel free to contact me if you have comments or questions: brandondaytonATgmail.com

Thanks everyone for a great 2009, and here’s to an even better 2010!