Double Standards in Style

I had an interesting realization the other day about the way people judge the quality of realistic versus cartoony drawing styles. It seems to me that the more someone tries to maintain a realistic style, the more harshly criticized they will be when they don't "fully achieve" it. Cartoony styles get no critique like this.

As I've done before, perhaps Rob Liefeld will be a good example. Liefeld is often criticized for his unrealistic body proportions and suspect anatomical correctness — despite being proficient in his craft. However, I've never heard of Matt Groening criticized as having a poor understanding of anatomy for the Simpson's only having four fingers, or that practically no one has chins.

It seems to me that with cartoony styles, we accept that drawings are more of a representation of a concept than a re-creation of "reality." The more realistic the style becomes, the less accepting people are of this, yet it still remains true: The capacity to draw is for representing thoughts visually.

More on Imitation in Drawing

Brent Wilson and Marjorie Wilson have done a lot of great work on child drawing that has influenced my thinking, especially since they take comics and manga into account a lot. I got to meet Brent last year at a manga exhibit, and he was a really nice guy. Here's another good (old) article that I recently read (it won't be the last):

Wilson, Brent, and Marjorie Wilson. "An Iconoclastic View of the Imagery Sources in the Drawings of Young People." Art Education 30.1 (1977): 4-12.

Wilson and Wilson present findings that contrast the century-old belief that imitation is bad for learning to draw. This view focused on the belief that children have an innate purity to drawing that emerges out of their natural tendencies. Imitation is thought to defile this purity. Additionally, due to their iconicity, drawing has been seen as the correspondence between the world and mental equivalences of those objects.

The Wilsons' data counteracts this with the observations that of the hundreds of drawings gathered from high school students, virtually all of them could be traced back to imitation of some other source of representation (especialy comics and cartoons, but not much fine-art). They note that the learning of drawing might be more similar to learning words (though they don't seem to really know what that means beyond common sense knowledge).

They propose that people are using/creating mental models for drawing, and that minor modifications to generalized structures can aid in creating specific representations. At times, these models would be begun to be employed, yet abandoned part way through if the drawer couldn't produce the desired result with that schema.

People might also have mental models for one type of representation, but be unable to do drawings outside of that model. So, drawing novel objects either results in sub-adaquate ability or deploy existing models from other domains.

In total, people seem to be able to store hundreds of these types of mental models. For instance, one subject who drew comics could create figures in innumerable ways. When drawing a figure he hasn't before, they hypothesize that he "averages" several of the models together to produce the new form. To me, this raises the question whether the aggregation of these models creates a singular more abstract schema or whether it remains a catalogue of numerous "malleable" models.

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This means the mind has a place to store such visual schemas, a "photological" component akin to a "phonological" component for spoken language. As I've said before, if perception is the desired stimulus for drawing, models aren't created from existing models — so the system never creates a conventional set of signs.

And just to riff on my previous post, this is also the reason why drawing perspective might be "awkward" for learners — because it sidesteps metal modeling in order to exact a system of depth through measurement (as opposed to schemas... though "loose" drawing of perspective might involve some level of mental modeling created by learning how to do it. I'll have to see if there's research on that...).

I had a 13-ish year old student when I taught "drawing comics" in an afterschool program, who could not draw perspective for a tile floor in a hallway. He drew the receding lines of the hall walls with us as a group, then when drawing the floor on his own he drew it flat — like an aerial view. My interpretation: he couldn't override his existing mental models for spatial representation with new ones for perspective. That's not to say he couldn't if he worked at it, but at that moment he couldn't do it.

Finally, note that perspective and schemas are both learned — the difference is that one is acquired "effortlessly" through imitation (as they'd say in language acquisition) and the other is taught explicitly.

Point perspective

Austin Kleon has a nice little post about point perspective in comics, noting his like of artists who don't use it at all (link via Derik). The preference for point perspective is of course wrapped up in the whole desire for iconicity that readers of this blog are probably sick of hearing me rant about.

His post got me to think about some other related issues. For instance, point perspective was developed in the Renaissance, which I imagine coincided with the Enlightenment's focus on discovery about the world and the rise of science. (Though, I have no idea since I'm not an art historian.)

What is worth remembering though is that point perspective was truly a discovery. The human mind/brain may be able to see in perspective, but we don't draw in it. There was a study** I read that talked about South African children (ages 5-9) who had trouble with understanding certain parts of images. The parts they misinterpreted the most were perspective, depth, and shading — all highly iconic and things that must be explicitly taught to people learning to draw.

Interestingly, when looking at the data, the means for misinterpretation drop for children at Grade 3 (and 9 yr. olds) in almost all categories. The conclusion of the author is that schooling teaches children how to understand images, but this could just be a coincidence in that children’s exposure to images comes in a school setting. That is, it’s not about instruction, but about exposure.

Whatever the case, perspective is not a built in part of the human graphic system. This again goes to the point that drawing is less about mimicking the perception of the world as piped through an individual's mind, and more about the way minds are enabled to convey concepts visually.

Update: I feel I should add, that there's nothing wrong with learning how to draw with point perspective, only that our minds' graphic system is not predisposed to it. As an academic, I'm not prescribing anything, just analyzing. Learning perspective requires iconic understanding that doesn't just come out of imitation of other people's drawings. That is, it once again skirts conventionality and the establishment of mental models for drawing in lieu of imitating perception.



** Liddell, Christine. 1997. Every Picture Tells a Story—Or does it?: Young South African Children Interpreting Pictures. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, Vol. 28, No. 3. Pp. 266-283

16 panels that are Still Conventional whether you think they work or not

I neglected posting this ealier in the week, but John Morris has a parody/homage to Wally Wood's 22 Panels that always work over at Comixpedia entitled 16 Panels That I Don't Think Work All That Well. There are a couple things I find theoretically interesting about it.

First off, it is a great compilation of conventionalized patterns used in many comics. Just like WW's 22 Panels and the Peanuts patterns I've been finding recently, this list excellently shows how there are systematic and conventionalized patterns in the visual language used in comics. This is in contrast to the view that graphic creation is unrestrained because it mimics perception, and thereby lacks an experss system of mentally stored patterns. Astute observations like these 16 panels excellently show that there is systematic and patterned visual vocabulary used by "visual language speakers" (and I wish more people would do work like this!).

The second thing this list shows is a preference for the use of some representations over others (WW's 22 Panels does this too, though positively as opposed to negatively). Linguistics has often been in perpetual debate with journalists/English teachers/etc. that believe there is a right or wrong way to use language. We are often told "not to end a sentence with a preposition," or "not to split infinitives" — though these are not in any way real rules of English grammar. (They were prescribed by grammar book writers in the 18th century who were enamored with Latin — so they advocated Latin's rules for English, not at all being sensitive to the fact that, y'know, they're totally different languages!!).

This list's intent is prescriptive in the same way. Despite these being consistent conventional trends used in this visual language, they are gauged by their value in usage. An additional aspect to this is the Art perspective most invoked in the comments below the article. Most people object to these panels simply because they are conventional! They're "overused," which means they aren't new and innovative/original — which makes them undesirable to the Art viewpoint.

However, none of this mitigates the fact that these panel types are conventional. The linguist would say "they're all part of language, let's observe how people use them" while the prescriptivist says "they're part of language, but they really shouldn't be, and those who use them are less sophisticated speakers."

It's interesting to note also that no matter how loudly prescriptivism might object to such "bad" usage, it never has an effect on shaping language usage. It's not like split infinitives have gone away because people advocate against them! Nor do I suspect these 16 panels to go away either.

In some ways both aspects of a list like this shows some good headway in recognition of this visual language as a language on the whole. Not only are people recognizing the patterns, they're also judging them prescriptively, just like any other language!

Thoughts on a visual e/i-language

Big breath; prepare for a long post...

Most of the time, people think about languages as being "out there in the world" – consisting of a conventional list of words and rules that we all access. This leads to people commenting frequently things like "that's not a word," out of the belief that there is some external authority that dictates what is or isn't in a language.

In contrast, a cognitive approach to language looks at it as a phenomenon of individual's minds, and that the mutual conventionality of many minds creates the artiface of a system that is "out there" abstracted from those individuals. Several linguists have tried to delineate the relationship of a language to its speakers.

The first major one would have to be Ferdinand de Saussure, who made the breakdown between langue and parole. While parole describes a language in use as a dynamic social activity, langue was the notion of an abstract system of expression beyond its usage.

Noam Chomsky did Saussure one better though. Chomsky maintains that this system of expression is located squarely within a human mind/brain, what he calls an internal or i-language. In contrast, and external or e-language covers both of Saussure's terms: 1) external speech behavior and 2) the system as something in the world, abstracted as we call English or Chinese.

In reality, E-langauges are built out of the mutual intelligibility of people's i-languages, which often differ based on geography and community. A good example is an irregular derviational rule like the plural of "cactus." For a Southern Californian like me, the plural is the irregular "cacti," because it's common enough in daily life to be out of the ordinary. But for, say, a Bostonian who lives around me now and never interacts with them, the prickly stuff might be called "cactuses" using the plural "s" rule of English. Both are "right" in a cognitive sense, because the cognitive structure differs based on ecological context (most jargon is like this too).

An "e-language" distinction dislikes this, yet it's the reason that dialects exist at all. They are just degrees to which people's mutual intelligiblity of i-languages group in a graded way. The "r"-less Bostonians down the road from me certainly have different rules that they follow in their i-language than I do, but our systems are close enough that we understand each other.

And... all this is setting up some useful concepts for what I really want to talk about: drawing.

I've discussed previously that there is a cultural force of an "Art perspective" that affects the development of people's drawings skills in our culture. While they may be cognitively inclined towards imitation, the Art perspective guides them towards having an individualistic style and away from using the shared structures of a community.

OR, in Chomsky's terms... the Art perspective pushes people to have i-languages that (for the most part) don't build into an e-language. There are some exceptions to this of course, maily in conventional symbols like word balloons and speed lines.

Note the semiotic allowance here though: the symbolic aspects must be conventionalized and thus easily build to a shared structure that becomes more "out there" in the world abstracted from users. But, the broader iconicity of the system (that the signs resemble what they look like) allows for a degree of mutual intelligibility without mandated conventionality. This lets individuals' styles be inexplicably tied to their own i-languages.

We immediately recognize people's styles as belonging just to them, expressing their i-language, not tied to a broader visual e-language. And, people tend to get in a huff when other people "encroach" upon one's visual i-langauge. This is the taboo of copying another person's style, instead of being looked at as building or accessing a broader visual e-language.

A result of this is the belief that images have no explicit system behind them at all, since no e-language is built. Again, since drawings are iconic, and everyone's i-languages tend to differ so much, there is an appeal to perceptual knowledge as why we can understand images, instead of a specific cognitive system at work in graphic creation.

Mannerism, Imitation, and Iconic Bias

Dirk (who kindly keeps linking to my posts) provides some thoughts on my last post about imitation by describing "Mannerism" (about halfway down the post).

He describes the Renaissance Mannerists (what I'll call abstractly as "cohort 2") copied the style of the first wave of Renaissance artists like Leonardo and Michaelangelo that came before them ("cohort 1"). Where cohort 1 actually studied the anatomy of real animals and people, cohort 2 simply copied cohort 1. As a result, cohort 2 is said by Dirk to have...

"the surface tics of the Rennaissance masters down pat, but his work displays none of the anatomical understanding by which they came to be able to create such accomplished illusions of form and light. Mannerism is an artistic game of Whisper, with details lost and distorted as they move further away from their point of origin."

Dirk goes on apply this same process to describe the work of Rob Liefeld and others (who I've oddly defended on this front before).

Now, this quote to me summarizes almost exactly the points I made last time that are inherent to the "Art" perspective. With Mannerism, it's not just about copying — it's that cohort 1 didn't copy at all, they drew from real life. This is what I've called Iconic Bias in past posts (parts one, two, three): The belief that the graphic modality of expression should resemble real life ("iconicity" in the semiotic sense). The "purity" of that first cohort is drawn from iconicity, and the lack of it in cohort 2 leads to their derision.

My response is that this isn't the way the human mind is primed (the "Language" perspective): the mind is primed for imitation, and any drawing "style" is a reflection of mental patterns that have become habituated within a drawer's long-term memory. Those patterns become set in this case through one of two ways: 1) copying other people's patterns, or 2) copying perception and siphoning that iconicity through one's mental structures.

The "Art" perspective says that only choice two should be acceptable, with minimal influence from choice one. Recall for instance, McCloud's Six Steps of learning from Understanding Comics: His first level is imitation, but then all subsequent steps require one to cast aside all other influences.

But, as I've pointed out in the past, rejecting the influence of any cohort before your own works against the establishment of conventional signs — which are what language is made up entirely of. The only reason there is a "graphic dialect" of a superhero style at all is because of imitation. Manga thrive on a style that was founded on imitation (Tezuka being largely considered cohort 1, but Walt Disney and others being cohort -1 for him).

Imitation hasn't hurt manga at all. In fact, I'd argue that it has probably helped them in numerous ways: 1) A consistent cultural style allows more focus to be placed on what that style is used to express story-wise than so much focus on the surface depictions. 2) A consistent style across numerous authors is more readily accessible to young readers, especially those who want imitate them. In America, when children want to "draw comics," they want to draw stories about stuff. But, when kids want to "draw manga" they want to draw stories in the style of manga because that's the visual vocabulary that they are now exposed to.

This is just like language: "Exposure + practice = fluency." With language, successive cohorts are always the manner by which it is transmitted. A great example of this is Nicaraguan Sign Language, where several deaf children who had created their own gesture systems combined their contributions to make cohort 1. Successive cohorts took what they did only to refine and alter it into further grammatical patterns. With the anti-imitation influence of Art, this process of conventionalization is largely lost (outside symbolic signs like word balloons and speed lines at least).

The Art pespective just wants to substitute the cognitive man-made exposure for that of real life, and with that, jettisoning an idea of fluency (proficiency in a system) for skill (accuracy at depicting real life): "Perception + practice = skill at representing perception."

While I won't go into it at length, I find it intriguing that in Dirk's same post, there is a damning attitude for Greg Land, who takes iconicity to the extreme by drawing wholly from photo reference — only that he picks and chooses parts of photos to combine thereby messing up the anatomy. So, here it seems to be the case of messing up iconicity through the most iconic method possible!


Final note, so my intentions aren't misunderstood: I should point out that this is not a post of advocacy; I'm not saying people should or shouldn't copy other people. I'm just trying to analyze the issues involved, and in some case, defend all strategies as being cognitively acceptable.

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Update 2/26: Dirk has a short reply to this post (halfway down). I don't have much in response to it except that it still maintains the "Iconic bias" underlying the last couple posts . Beyond that, he makes some interesting points.

Imitation is bad!... in the immediate

This post over at CBR had an interesting take on some of the Art vs. Language issues that I discuss, so I felt I should link to it. One of its main arguments is the common thread of "don't imitate other people's styles," i.e. be an individual.

The anti-imitation viewpoint (what I call related to the "Art" perspective) is wrapped up in two ideas: 1) that people should be "individuals" in their drawing style — different from other people. 2) That drawing is an imitation of life (Iconicity), and that a person's style is simply their own manner of siphoning those visuals into graphic form.

Both of these run against the "Language" perspective which pushes communal signs that are conventionally shared amongst a culture, learned through imitation. In Language, it isn't so much a matter of using novel structures (words, drawing styles) but of using those structures to say something interesting and novel.

What I thought was interesting about this post in particular is well expressed in this paragraph (italics from the original):

Don't imitate John Cassaday, find out who John's inspirations were, whose work he learned from, and imitate them. Because even if you can imitate John's work, or Jim's, or Frank's, etc., the best you can achieve through imitation is a mimicry of style, and to be known as an imitator. Style, good or bad, is really the only thing that's going to separate you from the pack, and it's not something you can add into your work. Not really. Style is where your personality surfaces in your work, and true style is accidental.

The underlying "Art" sentiments should be obvious here, but what's interesting is the belief that it's okay to copy somewhat, just not of the "generation" right before yours. It didn't just say "don't copy other people," instead it argued for people to copy the artists who the-artists-you-like copied!

While I understand the argument, and can sympathize at least somewhat with the sentiment in terms of creative endeavors (i.e. the type expressed in the Dylan quote at that articles start), what really makes copying one generation's drawing styles different than any other? Why is there this assumption that there is a degradation that occurs from one generation to the next, and that somehow there is a more "pure" root that aught to be copied from?

If anything, this lesson in history should show that everyone is influenced by other people and that you can probably trace those influences so far you'll lose track of who the actual people were. So, why not embrace the imitative styles since its what we're mentally inclined to do in the first place?

I love the Language equivalent of this: "Don't learn to speak English from your parents and peers! You should learn from Middle English... Those guys really knew how to speak back then!"

Iconic Bias, Part 3

So, last post I talked about how criticism of certain drawing styles stems from the fact that critics might speak a different dialect of visual language. The Art Perspective would have trouble recognizing the idea of graphic dialects because it sees drawing as a siphon for drawing "real life," which leads to the second reason why people might deride certain styles:

Reason 2: They see an issue of skill, not fluency

Rather than seeing graphic ability as a proficiency in a set of communal standards (fluency), people regard drawing as a "skill" that people are "better" or "worse" at. In the Art view, this skill is often determined by how accurate real proportions are held up. Judging representations based on iconicity gives an "objective" basis for claims of value.

Granted, the communal signs of the visual language community may not be prevalent as standardized signs like in spoken language (largely due to the forces brought this Art Perspective). However, within an individual author's style, they have consistencies and patterns. But, you really can just tell when someone is or isn't fluent, based on your own fluency.

I should also note "fluency" makes no judgment about the nature of the content. It purely has to do with reaching a certain degree of proficiency with drawing. Indeed, there are several very popular comics both on the web and not that are very well written and have great content, yet I'd say that their authors are less than wholly graphically fluent.

The fact of the matter is that Liefeld is undeniably graphically fluent: he has internally consistent and patterned ways of drawing and does so to a high degree of proficiency within that style. Sure, his proportions and anatomy may not be accurate to "real life," but this is only an issue if you believe that drawings should match real life, as opposed to patterned mental structures.

Aside from the issue of fluency levels, it is these same issues that lead people to think that certain drawings might be more "primitive" than others, like Egyptian drawings or cave paintings. Appealing to iconicity lets there be a scale of "progress" relating different styles to each other (like the notion "we've progressed so much in drawing since those old days"). Systems using point perspective and shading are believed to be "superior" to those that are flat or fixed to a certain angle-of-viewpoint, because the former is more iconic. A Language view doesn't allow this: all systems are equal, only they do things in different ways.

And finally, a thought to sum up the way that Art can (and does) fit with a Language view: Language (including visual language) is what a structure is, Art is what you can do with it.

Iconic Bias, Part 2

As I discussed in my previous post, there is an Art Perspective belief that people should learn to draw from "real life" and not from copying others. In that post, I tried to tease out some of the underlying assumptions of this belief. Here, I'd like to point out how it leads to derision of other approaches (as demonstrated in the quotes from the last posts).

(Caveat: Just to be clear, and to avoid misperceptions, I don't have a problem with people drawing realistically. I'm just trying to examine the underlying assumptions that motivate perceptions of drawing. And, I should also add, that I too am a product of the culture of Iconic Bias, as it did and still does inform many of my graphic decisions.)

There are two reasons those who hold this Iconic Bias might think that certain styles, like say Rob Liefeld's drawings or the manga style, are substandard:

Reason 1: They speak a different graphic language/dialect

People will rag on certain styles mainly because they belong to a different graphic dialect. People who aren't comfortable with the early 90s Image style or manga style (or many others) as their visual language end up making fun of it or calling it substandard. This is similar to the treatment of African American Vernacular English (popularly known as Ebonics) in America. Some speakers of Standard English end up thinking that speakers of African American Vernacular English are somehow stupid or have less skill in language, when really the fact is that they speak a different dialect of English that has its own patterns and consistencies. It's not "lesser" its just different.

Of course, the Iconic Bias has an easy time making these judgments, because it doesn't allow for there to even be such a notion as graphic dialects: drawings are valued on their relations to "real life perception," not mental patterns. The sheer recognition of drawing styles as cohesive systems runs against the free-for-all in how "each individual interprets real life."

More coming in the next post…

Iconic Bias, Part 1.5

Here's another subtle example of this Iconic Bias that I discussed in my earlier post. From a recent new interview with Scott McCloud, the interviewer asked:

"What’s hard for you to draw?"

Can you see the subtle bias here? Give it some thought…

It assumes that the capacity for drawing is about "drawing things in the world" — and drawing them as their supposed to look — as opposed to drawing being a capacity for expressing concepts, which just happen to look like things out "in the world." Let me rephrase the question: "What [things out there in the world are] hard for you to draw?"

In contrast to a Language approach, imagine asking someone, "What words are hard for you to pronounce?" Scott's answer is also illustrative, because it invokes the need for reference photos, tied to that same perspective (if its not in the mind, I need to reference "out there in the world").

Snark I can't hold back: Why is this question even there? I mean, really, this is Scott McCloud, the guy who ushered in deep thinking about comics. You really want to waste a question asking him what he doesn't draw well? Puh-lease.

OK, I swear, next post on this I'll get into some of the results of this Iconic Bias.

Iconic Bias, Part 1

I've tried to point out in some of my writings that there is an "Art" perspective that dominates the usage of graphic creation in our culture. Its primary emphasis is for innovation and individuality in styles in contrast to a "Language" perspective that seems communality and shared signs.

Regarding learning, the "Art" view has two emphases:

1. Developing one's own style apart from everyone else (i.e. "don't copy other people's drawings")
2. Learning to draw by imitating real life

I'd like to take aim at #2 in this post, since I think that it carries more assumptions with regard to it. #1 may be something that is emphasized, but its hard not to get influenced by other sources anyways, and the prevalence of "house styles" (Marvel house style, etc) or "cultural styles" (manga style) easily shows how group consistency does happen. Of course the assumptions under #2 motivate the "anti-style" tendencies of #1 as well.

The basic assumption underlying #2, that people should learn to draw by imitating real life, is related to what I call the "Veil of Iconicity." This outlook treats graphic creation (drawing) as something that is not rooted conceptually. The graphic form is merely a siphon through which "real" (looking) things are represented. And, if not done directly through "life drawing," then that mode is what should at least inform a person's drawing "from their imagination".

Now, several people have tried to tell me that "drawing from life" is no longer an emphasis of Art, but I've found these quotes recently on a variety of comic message boards:

"I hate manga/anime. You know why? They are all hacks. It doesn't take any talent to draw round heads and big eyes. It takes a lot of skill to draw accurately proportioned figures that are anatomically correct (traditional line art)."

"Comic books, whether drawn by pinheads like Liefeld or superb artisans like Gil Kane, are a terrible training ground for drawing - even if you intend to learn how to draw comics. All you're picking up the the graphic shorthand the artist has developed to represent figures and environments so he can draw from his imagination. It's always a stylistic distortion, a poor substitute for life drawing or copying photos."

"...photos will build your skills a lot better than copying someone else's ink lines."

This is exactly the Art perspective I'm talking about.

Again, this perspective leaves out the role of the mind in relation to drawing. Patterned ways of drawing, as stored in long-term memory (your "imagination," as if it were a bad thing), are made to seem less valid than just rerouting perception through the graphic form. Sure, by definition an "iconic" sign "gets its meaning by resembling what it represents." However, that doesn't mean that such signs must exhibit this to the maximal degree, all the time (if at all), and without accepting that such signs must come from the human mind.

I'll continue this with the next post, delving more into some of the results of this belief.