Alternate Title: Drawing Wrongly Is Harder Than You Think.
When I was learning to draw comics, my favorite artists were the ones who drew the most realistically, guys like John Buscema, Gene Colan and Bernie Wrightson. I didn’t grok the more stylized artists, Jack Kirby in particular. I couldn’t understand why people thought he was a genius. My goal as a young artist was to learn to draw as accurately as possible and I got pretty good at it. Later on, when I worked in advertising, those skills paid off when I drew my own storyboards.
My tastes have changed since then and now I love the excess of Kirby’s art. His exuberant style, once incomprehensible to me, looks like more fun to draw than the academic approach and, sometimes when I sit down to draw a new Amateur Mortician story, I vow to loosen up and take more chances.
An artist I look to for inspiration is Jerry Grandenetti who was a regular at Creepy and Eerie magazines. His pages are wild compositions where the logic of light and rules of perspective are highly flexible. Yet, despite my intentions of creative freedom, the magnetic pull of precision often proves irresistible.
Usually it starts with a hand or pose where I need reference material. Once I get one part of the drawing to look right, the need for rightness spreads to the rest of the figure, then to the panel. If I don’t catch myself, anatomy, perspective and light logic can take over the entire story.
In reflecting on this endless struggle, I recognize it as an inherent aspect of the artistic journey. The tension between perfection and expression is not merely confined to the page but mirrors the complexities of the human experience. As an artist, navigating these seemingly contradictory impulses is both a challenge and an adventure—one that ultimately shapes not only my art but also my understanding of self.
Fred Stesney 