Nate Powell Quotes

Image is an international language.

Pictures are so good at giving people information that they're not looking for.

A sign to me is a one-liner, a symbol is very complex and my house is a series of symbols.

The movies that influenced me were movies that told their stories through pictures more than words.

There's a certain visual grammar you've got to stick in. For example, if a character has just woken up, draw him in his pajamas with the bed a bit rumpled. Or if he's ill, draw little bottles with red crosses on that immediately communicate medicine, and a box of tissues.

Images have a unique power to impart that which is beyond words.

An illustration is a visual editorial - it's just as nuanced. Everything that goes into it is a call you make: every color, every line weight, every angle.

A picture is worth 10K words - but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures.

The photographic image... is a message without a code.

I've always been so surprised by how people interpret my photos in context.

I think of images as an immune system and a transit system.

I believe that eyes are very important motifs. That's something that can discern the peace and love.

Style is the image of character.

I'm fascinated with what an audience will take away from an image.

There is this looking at the world as shapes and patterns and colors that have meaning, and you can't deny the superficial because the superficial is what meets the eye.

It has been said that 80% of what people learn is visual.

I think people remember pictures not dialogue. That's why I like pictures.

With comics, you've got to develop some kind of shorthand. You can't make every drawing look like a detailed etching. The average reader actually doesn't want all that detail; it interferes with the flow of the reading process.

When I work on a book, I usually start with a question. And I don't sit around and go 'I need to write a book. What's a good question?' It will be a question that's just clanging around in my head. So for 'What It Is,' it was this idea of 'What is an image?'

The Bible never tells us what Jesus looked like, and in the earliest surviving paintings of him, he is sometimes depicted as short-haired, sometimes as beardless, with no authoritative version winning out over the others. Yet around 400 A.D., all of the other competing images were replaced by the long-haired, bearded Jesus we know today.

Well, visual language is another boring discussion about the nature of film.

I draw on a lot of cinematic influences like Ingmar Bergman and Wim Wenders, artists who let a story take its time. Comics are a visual medium, and visuals should be allowed to tell some of that story.

I did television for a very long time, but if you're on television, words don't count. What the eye sees beats the words. If you switch sides, from radio to television, you learn that the wordiness that you learn on the radio is useless or not nearly as powerful, and you have to learn to trust that the eye will just beat the ear.

Hence it is that the shape of something is especially meaningful.

I wanted to communicate what I had seen, so that others could see it.