I’m trying to produce a comic book as a hobby, and decided to hire an artist to help me. (I can draw, but two heads are faster than one.) Starting about six weeks ago, we’ve been getting together on Sundays to work, and so far he’s been diligent in showing up. He works a reasonably solid eight hour shift with me, and doesn’t seem like a bad sort overall. His art style meshes relatively well with mine.
But I fear that his connection to the world and his surroundings are pretty slight.
The best example was this last Sunday. I had spent most of the previous day trying to design a title for the comic and decided that all of the various brush tools in my art program couldn’t capture the right look, so I would need to buy a real paint brush and some sumi ink.
When he showed up, I showed him the work I had done and discussed my plan to try real ink. He suggests some things to try in the program, but I’d already tried most of them, so I set him to work and get ready to head out to the art store. When I get back, I get out some paper and start drawing on it in the kitchen, on the linoleum, to keep my place clean. He comes out to get a glass of water and I explain how my intent is to draw each letter several times, and then scan and choose the best to put together. He goes back to my office to keep working. Once I have a nice selection of letters, I go back into the office and start scanning pages in, moving around the room and working on the table right next to him. Finally I have everything in the computer and I’ve got a good arrangement of letters, laid out as the title, and ask him what he thinks. He comes over and suggests that I try out some of the different brush settings in the software to get different looks. A bit confused, I think maybe he thinks I’d gone back to trying to do the letters digitally, so I point out that the letters are scans. He again reiterates that the art software has lots of different settings so I should be able to create a real-looking ink brush if I configure it right. Again, I reiterate that what he’s looking at is real ink brush. He tries to show me where the settings in the software are to play with the software brush, just to realize that the art program isn’t the same one as we use for painting, which seems to throw him off at last. Disgruntled, he goes back to his desk and continues working.
Only about an hour later, when he goes back into the kitchen again and sees a several dozen pages of scrawl, scattered around the floor, does he seem to realize that I’d actually been painting letters with real ink. Outright telling him that I had painted with real ink and scanned it in, and that that’s what he was looking at hadn’t been enough for him to register what he was looking at.
Drawing out the storyboard for the comic, he did a good and efficient job. But now that we’ve gotten to the part where he needs to start laying out pages, he’s ended up with two or three aborted starts, wasting most of the last two work days, without producing a usable page 1. He can’t seem to coordinate out how to take each of the planned cells, put them together on the page, and make them pretty.
His first attempt, he drew out rectangles on the page and dropped in scanned cells from the storyboard. The aspect ratio of the rectangles didn’t match, so he stretched the scans out to fit the spaces he had made for them, making each picture look like something from a fun-house mirror. I saw this and pointed out that the pictures had been distorted and he needed to crop and draw out more detail, to fill out the rectangles. About an hour later, I looked over again, and he had been tracing the distorted images. I had to spend a reasonable while to get him to understand that it’s okay if the storyboard rectangles aren’t the same size as the slots they’re going into.
This last Sunday, he started again from scratch, deciding to redraw a nice, production-ready version of each panel on its own page. Unfortunately, I’d been at the art shop and in the kitchen, so I didn’t catch this till quite late. Between our talk on how to fit things into the layout the previous week, and an email I’d written which also detailed how to do it, I’d figured he’d be fine on his own. But once I see what he’s doing, I have to stop him. The first panel that he has drawn and nicely inked out and finished is set up to look alright if it fits the top half of a page. Page 1 only has three cells, though, and the layout he had been going for the previous week was one large image across the top and two smaller images below. If you split the page how his completed image would fit it, the two bottom cells would each be really tall and narrow - which would be ugly. Or if you tried to lay it out as three long narrow panels on top of each other, his “completed” picture was still only 2/3rds done because he would need to add more content on the sides. I ask him how he was planning to lay them out on the page. He tries dropping panel 1 at the top of the page and moving the rectangles to fit it, producing two tall and narrow lower panels. The discussion from there would take more description than seems worth relating here, but suffice it to say that he was still struggling with how to put three images on the same page, together.
If it had just been the problems with layout, I would just assume that he’s not very bright (though as my brother pointed out to me, for an artist to think it’s reasonable to distort images is pretty extreme). But adding the first example, I fear that my artist is really just out to lunch. If I could just point him at a rectangle and say, “Fill that rectangle with art”, I think he’d do well. But if I need him to be able to plan out how disparate parts fit together (I’m afraid of what will happen when we get to the point where he has to consider how text bubbles will be able to fit into the panels), then I fear I might have to micromanage him through each page, which mostly defeats the purpose of having another artist.
So basically, it seems like my options are to either broach the topic with him and see if there’s anything he can start doing (or, this being Seattle, stop doing) so that when he comes over to work, he’s in the same room with me in more than the literal sense. Or, to dump him and seek another artist.
So how best to broach this subject? I don’t know what’s wrong with him, or if there’s anything that he can do about it. For all I know, he has a legitimate issue and this as good as it gets. Or, if he’s just getting high before coming over, is that something which can even last 8+ hours?