I have about 20 sketchbooks from my childhood filled with drawings, but I’d only have a page here or there where I was trying to figure out how to do comics.
I don’t labor over my drawings. I want to get freedom in the line.
I have three assistants, but there isn’t a head assistant. All the important drawings I do myself. Every single character is also done by me.
‘Painting like a child’ isn’t a negative for me… it’s something only great artists can really achieve. The childlike quality of some of Picasso’s drawings is precisely what makes them so masterful and extraordinary; the ability to express complete visions, feelings and portraits through a continuous line.
Drawings help people to work out intricate relationships between parts.
I’ve got two girls, and they both make beautiful drawings. One of them really has a gift for the way that she colors around certain lines.
I rarely draw myself, in general, and if I do, I tend to do little cute manga-esque, almost bite-sized drawings of myself.
I grew up with the idea of the cyborg and the robot, but at the same time I felt this intense disconnection between the things I was engaged with and inspired by in terms of fun and play. It seemed like paintings and drawings were so static.
I can often tell when drawings are done from photographs, because you can tell what they miss out, what the camera misses out: usually weight and volume – there’s a flatness to them.
Doing fashion drawings was the only way I had to express myself when I was a teenager.
Cartoons are not real drawings, because they are drawings intended to be read.
Animation is not the art of drawings that move but the art of movements that are drawn.
I like to draw, and my drawings are what yell and scream for me.
Then one day I thought it would be wonderful to make a whole book, to make my text and my drawings together, and that’s how I started doing children’s books.
The war was a mirror; it reflected man’s every virtue and every vice, and if you looked closely, like an artist at his drawings, it showed up both with unusual clarity.
I have kept a diary as long as I can remember, and drawings are really another kind of diary.
When Bruce Lee gets his cameo in ‘The Green Hornet’ – as one of the drawings in Kato’s notebook – it clarifies what the film is: an unrealized sketch. A sketch can afford to allude to a point of view. Moviemakers need to show their point of view, something this shrug of a movie never gets around to doing.
I don’t usually go in for reviews of buildings that aren’t yet built, since you can tell only so much from drawings and plans, and, besides, has there ever been a building that didn’t look great as a model?
I’ve been a comics fan since my first hit of those gateway drawings: Judy, Asterix, and the TV cartoon ‘Spider-Man and his Amazing Friend’ – which naturally led me to Spider-Man comics.
We made drawings the size of a whole quarter of a room ceiling, which we would then send on to the model makers. I did this every day for two years. Even now I can draw cartouches with my eyes closed.
During the winter when the weather is too poor to work outside, I do use drawings and photographs, but I change my work so it is not just a time and place study.
The Internet is a crazy archive of a lot of old everything. Paintings, drawings, old, new, and everything in between.
I was always most interested in drawing – most of my childhood drawings are black-and-white line work. And when I kind of abandoned comics, through college and art school, I was doing a lot of painting. But once I started doing comics again, everything else just fell by the wayside.
The worse my drawings were, the more beautiful did the originals appear.
We feel closer to the drawings on the walls of Chauvet than the painting of, say, an Egyptian mural. These artists are not remote ancestors; they are brothers. They saw like us; they drew like us. We wear essentially the same clothes against the cold.
Here I am, a not over-good business man, a second-rate engineer. I can make poor mechanical drawings. I play the piano after a fashion. In fact, I am one of those proverbial Jack-of-all-trades who are usually failures. Why I am not, I can’t tell you.
I like my drawings to be direct. I don’t generally work on them for too long, but that doesn’t mean that they are not works in their own right.
I remember once giving my dad some drawings and writings and said, ‘If you could just give these to the publisher, that would be great.’ And I was about five!
I’d become the little surfer in my childhood drawings.
I used to always make art for girls. That was the thing I did for girls to like me. I did portraits, drawings, letters that formed outlines of significant things in our relationship. Art. I just used art in general. It usually worked.
I didn’t set out to be a singer. Actually, the earliest creative efforts I made were drawings copied from comics we got every week at the newsagent, or rearranging photos I cut out and pasted in scrapbooks.
Drawings don’t have a point. Cartoons, you want to have an opinion; you want them to express a viewpoint.
James Thurber was an inspiration because his drawings were so primitive. I am self-taught – I didn’t go to art school – so I thought when I started doing them, ‘If James Thurber can be a cartoonist, I can,’ because his stuff is very raw.
The first time I made any money, I was 27. I went to Bergdorf’s looking like a proper guttersnipe and bought a pair of Louboutins. I’d wear them and an old ink-stained kimono and make my drawings and feel indomitable.
I do remember when it occurred to me the first time, when I got the idea of painting the way I feel at a given moment. I was sitting in a chair and felt it pressing against me. I still have the drawings where I depicted the sensation of sitting.
The architect who first inspired me to follow this profession was Sir John Soane and his Regency home; well, his three homes, now a museum. The place is like an encyclopedia of paintings, antiquities, furniture, sculptures, and drawings.
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