I'm not a painter by any stretch of the imagination; I'm a dyed-in-the-wool traditional illustrator, and I begin with black and white. If I need colour, I add it over the top. There's a calligraphic element to it... it's about the texture of lines on the page.
My paintings are certainly nonobjective. They're just horizontal lines.
For characters where, in a comic, I'd avoid using screen tone because it's such a bother, I'd deliberately use it in animation in order to highlight their individual characteristics.
All painting - the painting of the past as well as of the present - shows us that its essential plastic means were only line and color.
We all accept the visual shorthand used throughout comics: if something's farther away, it'll be drawn with a thinner, simpler line, eventually leaving out most visual information and becoming a gesture, a skeletal representation of a thing.
I do love sparse cartooning.
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.
The graphic style itself is influenced by a lot of very layered and detailed comics that I read as a kid, like 'Vagabond' by Takehiko Inoue.
I like the way Quentin Tarantino creates a scene using a series of close-ups or showing very cool images of a person or people walking on some ordinary street in slow motion. I wish I could achieve that kind of slow-motion effect in manga, but it's rather difficult to draw; the only things we can play with are tones of black and white.
In art, there is no need for color; I see only light and shade. Give me a crayon, and I will paint your portrait.
When I was young, I colored in the line drawings in vintage editions of the Oz books that had been handed down through generations in my family. This was a bad thing to do.
I have been doodling since childhood. I have a passion for illustrating but cannot paint or colour for that matter. I illustrate what I am trying to communicate through my writing. My images are like drawings in a science text book.
I am quite convinced now... that the actual training of drawing cartoons - which is, of course, my style - led to my producing Spot. Cartoons must be very simple and have as few words as possible, and so, too, must the 'Spot' books.
I don't use names or captions for my many portraits of politicians and authors for newspapers. The drawing has to be self-explanatory, so I spend a lot of time sketching to find an idea and an angle that is clear.
The detail of my art depends entirely on the project itself. I tend to be a little more detail-oriented with covers than I am with interior pages, and I try to reduce the detail on action sequences as opposed to suspense passages.
The artwork on my packaging was something I painstakingly micro-managed - for example, I treat it like a tattoo, taking into consideration the muscle structure and seeing were the line lands on the existing body.
My drawing, like that of most cartoonists, is intended first of all to be functional: to create believable space and communicate information. My strongest point in drawing has always been my ability to show characters' nonverbal communication through facial expression and posture.
With the Larry Bertlemann portrait, I started with a photograph that I could use for it. I built the drawing's identity to serve as a graphic identity. After a number of sketches, I went into my own abstract vernacular of drawn lines and shapes to create the composition for the poster design.
I like the idea of taking three-dimensional objects and making them two-dimensional so that they look like cartoons.
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.
It doesn't use shading, but it does use stroke length variations.
