AJ POWER When I was young, Jim Henson was my biggest influence. I thought of becoming a set designer, so I built furnished worlds inside shoeboxes. Everything was anthropomorphized. I later found appreciation in drawing some comics and illustrating scenes. I discovered Moebius, a master comic artist, by accident and emulated his unique and fearless …
Writing process Dr Martin Luther King Jr wrote about 450 speeches a year, and delivered somewhere around 2,000 speeches in his lifetime. His most famous works took form over countless iterations and inter-weaving with previous sermons and writings, as well as integrated pieces of feedback from his friends and advisors. Preparations On August 27, 1963, …
Today’s creative challenge idea comes from AJ Power, the League’s illustration and comics instructor. This project combines a scribble-and-respond drawing with an aspect of the panel exercise from Day 2. AJ calls it a “Monkey Wrench” project, because it gets you out of your habits, and gives you something unexpected to work with. The primary …
I’ve been talking about how to use hands as expressive elements within a drawing. I love this idea so much, both for technical practice and for powerful personal expression, that I made a class to study expressive hands and heads, and I started collecting examples. Some I collected because I appreciated the rendering. Some I collected because the artist …
Hands do a lot of the talking for us. AJ Power reminded me of this when I dropped in on a recent Comics class. He was inviting students to illustrate the moods and interactions between characters by drawing their hands in gestures. That hit me as one of those obvious yet totally overlooked aspects of …
One of the best and most influential comic book artists of all time, Jean Giraud was born in Paris France in 1938, and drew under the pen name Moebius, after the German mathematician who created the Moebius strip. The French artist was famous in America for illustrating series such as the Silver Surfer parables published …
Yesterday’s headlines announced the first federal execution in 17 years. Because we needed some good news from our leadership, right? Right?!? The execution was by lethal injection, but the artistic resources in my mind recalled Warhol’s Electric Chair. Electric Chair is part of Warhol’s Death and Disaster series started in 1962. This series included car crashes, atom bombs, …
Dallas Contemporary’s digital exhibition EVERYTHING HURTS opened yesterday, June 16, 2020. In response to the recent murder of George Floyd, Dallas-based artist Jammie Holmes, with the support of Library Street Collective, initiated a public demonstration across-five U.S. cities on Saturday, May 30 between the hours of 11:30am and 9pm EST. Airplanes with banners highlighting Floyd’s …
When I went to college, my interests were broad. After going to community colleges for 6 years, I chose to transfer to a university instead of a specialized art school because I wanted to continue taking classes in a wide variety of subjects: philosophy, biology, music, art, linguistics, writing, everything I could get my head …