comics reference
Aug. 19th, 2006 12:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
egypturnashWally Wood's '22 Panels That Always Work'. What's interesting is comparing the label put on it and the actual use - while it's been distributed as a way to keep things visually interested when you're handed an overly-talky script, a teaching tool, its original intent was for Wood himself to use as a cheat sheet, but his assistants wanted copies, and they spread it to people who ended up working under them at other places.
It's not surprising that this became an instructional tool and a valuable reference** - these little distillations of knowledge get passed around like this. More than a few of my handouts in animation school were third-generation Xeroxes of stuff that originally started as studio tools. I learned the rules of 'shag always comes in threes' from a set of notes that seemed to originate in Oliver and Company; the tricks to defeat unconscious, weird, slanty asymmetry in your drawings were demonstrated to me in a handout originally made during production of Tthe Little Mermaid.
Cartoonists are hungry for tools to make their life easier, for these little nuggets of truth that are glaringly obvious once someone's put it into a handful of sentences or drawings. And now, they end up on the net, sooner or later. We won't let the best stuff go out of print. I've heard more than one story of Figure Drawing for All It's Worth being the course materials for a figure drawing class, despite it being out of print for years - it's a succinct reference, it's not allowed to just vanish, not when Xerox machines can make it available.
**or so it seems; personally, I'd never seen this until earlier this year, but then again I hung out in animation circles, not comics circles
It's not surprising that this became an instructional tool and a valuable reference** - these little distillations of knowledge get passed around like this. More than a few of my handouts in animation school were third-generation Xeroxes of stuff that originally started as studio tools. I learned the rules of 'shag always comes in threes' from a set of notes that seemed to originate in Oliver and Company; the tricks to defeat unconscious, weird, slanty asymmetry in your drawings were demonstrated to me in a handout originally made during production of Tthe Little Mermaid.
Cartoonists are hungry for tools to make their life easier, for these little nuggets of truth that are glaringly obvious once someone's put it into a handful of sentences or drawings. And now, they end up on the net, sooner or later. We won't let the best stuff go out of print. I've heard more than one story of Figure Drawing for All It's Worth being the course materials for a figure drawing class, despite it being out of print for years - it's a succinct reference, it's not allowed to just vanish, not when Xerox machines can make it available.
**or so it seems; personally, I'd never seen this until earlier this year, but then again I hung out in animation circles, not comics circles