I started off the exercise by trying to understand whether it was enough for me to just mimic Jack Kirby’s line art style and call it “drawing in his style” when in truth a lot of artists use the same technique. So I began to look at what made Kirby’s style so identifiable, the key aspects of his style, and of the striking aspects of his work is his shading method, which involves creating dramatic shadows by using a flat coat of black and almost no gradation whatsoever, besides a bit of hatching. In my experience, I find it safer to stay away from such methods because of the artwork potentially appearing too blocky.
I’ll be honest (not that it really matters) this is an exercise I actually dreaded doing, probably because I’m not nearly as good at being intricate with my work as Kirby is with his. Nonetheless, I continued the process by starting with a rough drawing of the artwork, which was actually quite spontaneously done, the product of which was probably my biggest mistake, but at the same time I can’t quite think of a better way to put people, a background and a location all in one image while keeping it simple. As it usually happens as when I leave things to spontaneity, the rough drawing was already too complicated for me to create the final artwork without getting fatigued five times during the process.
The composition was basically people in the foreground, a security ship in the midground, and buildings and a sky in the background. My biggest problem has always been buildings, and actually anything that requires straight lines and being meticulous. As usual, I started with the people.
At this point I was pleasantly surprised with how it had turned out, I actually kept my hopes up for the rest of the work after this. I think I began to understand why a certain artist I follow on Instagram…
…found so much satisfaction in playing with line thickness in his artwork and white it looked so satisfying to me. Finding the right balance of thickness and thinness in an object is essential to creating that sense of harmony, as I came to realise. Next came the midground and the background and a bit of shading.
So I decided to go with two versions, one version where I drew the line with the use of Kirby’s style at the lines, and one where I added his method of shading as well. The one above is how I would normally approach a scene like this in terms of shading, at least to a certain degree, but mainly the gradient part of it, which was easy enough.
I imagine this part actually needs far more care than I can imagine, in fact what I’ve done basically looks like placing a bunch of black paper cutouts on an already finished artwork. But the drama is visible to a very small extent.
Learning Log 