In preparation for the exposition Moebius Trans-Forme at the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris in 2010-2011, illustrator, comics artist and concept artist extraordinaire Jean Giraud, AKA Moebius, was filmed doing series of short drawings using digital painting software and a graphics tablet.
The videos, along with other related videos, are available on DailyMotion, but the folks at Muddy Colors have gathered the drawing videos together on one page.
It’s wonderful to have these available, short though they may be; it makes me wish more extensive records had been made before the artist’s untimely death in March of this year.
Though you can see that Giraud has drawn his rough sketch on an underlayer and is drawing his finish over that, I’ve had the pleasure of watching Giraud draw in traditional media without a preliminary sketch, and he went about it in much the same way — drawing very quickly and making parts of the drawing fairly complete as he expanded out from his starting point (see the convention sketch he did for my wife that accompanies my article on Giraud from March).
[Via Artw on MetaFilter]
I suppose these drawings were very different in philosophy than regular “serious” work. He did draw what I knew perfectly draw in these videos (well, at the end he drew ONLY what he liked to draw :-)). When you are comics artist, you know signing drawing is very different than work drawing.
I regret too that there is not more videos of great comics artist at work. Franquin, Moebius, Pratt, Tardi and so much more… Just a video where we could see the making of one page entirely…
Thanks for the thoughts, Li-An. I think Moebius was more able than most to combine what he liked to draw with actual projects. Even the work with Jodorowsky gave him a lot of flexibility. He was probably at his most restrained (but ironically did some of his very best work) on Blueberry.
Do we have a video of you drawing?
Reading this, the first thing to pop into my head is the 10-part raw footage of an interview (in Spanish) with the Argentinian comic book artis/master of the watercolor Carlos Nine that can be found on youtube.
I don´t know how much external links are welcome welcome, so I´m omitting it.
No Charley, you are right, I should make a video of me drawing. With new numeric cameras, it’s simpler to make videos. I will think about it.
For Moebius, there was a webcam on his work table at a time but I don’t think somebody could record this at the time – it was Web 1.0 🙂 I will ask to the Moebius Group.
I love watching how other artists draw and paint. I find it fascinating. I’ve never used any kind of digital painting software before, I guess I am a little afraid! Ha. Does anyone use any? Is it easy to pick up? Or am I going to find myself shouting at another piece of technology in my life?