I first read David Winner’s Brilliant Orange fifteen year ago. My first motives for reading the book were naive. I was an aspiring professional footballer. I’d read any book I could find on football, hoping to discover a professional path to imitate. It proved to be an impossible profession. When you’re sixteen, you have no hint to how the world works. You believe, and rightly so, that anything is possible. At nineteen I accepted my lifetime amateur footballer card. I continued my reading however, searching for inspiration or secret training exercises to improve my game. If I was an amateur, I wanted to be the best amateur among my peers. Fifteen years on, my motives to read Brilliant Orange has changed. I returned to the book to see how much the football world, in particular Dutch football, has changed. And in doing so, how much I have changed as well.
Author: Jack Fuzz
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Another Christmas window story. Almost every morning, I eat breakfast in the same diner, and this morning a man was painting the windows with Christmas designs. Snowmen. Snowflakes. Bells. Santa Claus. He stood outside on the sidewalk, painting in the freezing cold, his breath steaming, alternating brushes and rollers with different colors of paint. Inside the diner, the customers and servers watched as he layered red and white and blue paint on the outside of the big windows. Behind him the rain changed to snow, falling sideways in the wind.
The painter’s hair was all different colors of gray, and his face was slack and wrinkled as the empty ass of his jeans. Between colors, he’d stop to drink something out of a paper cup.
Watching him from inside, eating eggs and toast, somebody said it was sad. This customer said the man was probably a failed artist. It was probably whiskey in the cup. He probably had a studio full of failed paintings and now made his living decorating cheesy restaurant and grocery store windows. Just sad, sad, sad.
This painter guy kept putting up the colors. All the white “snow,” first. Then some fields of red and green. Then some black outlines that made the color shapes into Xmas stockings and trees.
A server walked around, pouring coffee for people, and said, “That’s so neat. I wish I could do that…”
And whether we envied or pitied this guy in the cold, he kept painting. Adding details and layers of color. And I’m not sure when it happened, but at some moment he wasn’t there. The pictures themselves were so rich, they filled the windows so well, the colors so bright, that the painter had left. Whether he was a failure or a hero. He’d disappeared, gone off to wherever, and all we were seeing was his work.
For homework, ask your family and friends what you were like as a child. Better yet, ask them what they were like as children. Then, just listen.
Merry Christmas, and thank you for reading my work.
Chuck PalahniukFrom the essay: Stocking Stuffers: 13 Writing Tips From Chuck Palahniuk
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The discipline is to wake up in the morning, not turn on the machines you know just um… make some coffee and sit down and just draw whatever comes to your mind
Paul Pope from: The Criterion Channel Studio Visits: Comic Artists on LONE WOLF AND CUB -
This Criterion Channel Studio Visits episode details the extensive influence Lone Wolf and Cub has had on comic creators.
Paul Pope shares how Lone Wolf and Cub brought the manga tradition of emphasizing character development over traditional three act plots.
Larry Hama explains how the fight scenes are depicted differently from their American counterparts. Lone Wolf and Cub uses cause and effect. A swing of the sword from character could be parried or missed by character B. This sequence would be reflected in the following panel.
Ronald Wimberly describes how mark making can communicate as its own language.
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The truth in man is no dictum….it is vital as eyesight,
If there be any soul there is truth….if there be man or
woman there is truth….If there be physical or
moral there is truth,
If there be equilibrium or volition there is truth…..if
there be things at all upon the earth there is truth.
O truth of the earth! O truth of things! I am determined
to press the whole way toward you,
Sound your voice! I scale mountains or dive in the sea
after you.
Walt Whitman often speaks of balance in his poems by calling out life’s opposite forces.
If there be man or woman there is truth…
If there be physical or moral…
I scale mountains or dive in the sea…
Each example is an opposite. Each noun or verb needs the other to exist.
From: Leaves of Grass 150th Anniversary Edition (Penguin Classics), pgs.158
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Jeff Lemire doesn’t draw comic panels, he paints them.
This page is so true.
The smells, sights, and sounds of of being a hockey player, or basketball player, or footballer, or whichever sport you played, call out to you all your life.
From: The Collected Essex County
Artist: Jeff Lemire
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These exercises are perfect if you’re not sure how to improve your drawing skills.
Peter also provides a practical regimen to follow.
Remember – make mistakes and rack up the mileage.
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Lucien Favre has plenty of critics.
They will all be out howling tonight after Dortmund blew a two goal lead to draw with RB Leipzig.
Fine. Howl away, but credit is due.
Why?
Jaden Sancho.
I’m not privy to the Dortmund training sessions, but when it comes to Jaden Sancho’s development as a player I suspect it’s more about what Farve doesn’t do.
He doesn’t beat down Jaden. He hasn’t coached the feints or stepovers out of him. It seems like he’s encouraged it.
In what was possibly Dortmund’s biggest match of the season, Farve let Jaden revel in the sheer joy of trying to beat 3 or 4 Leipzig defenders at a time. He let Jaden slot out on the left and play one two’s with Raphaël Guerreiro, even if the pair didn’t combine to go anywhere. And Jaden’s nutmeg on Konrad Laimer must’ve put a smile on Farve’s face, even though he gave the ball away almost immediately after.
For me, Jaden’s style of play reminds of a young Allen Iverson. The rookie year with Philadelphia Iverson. He plays with audacity for audacity’s sake. He’s Dortmund’s answer to all of the Bundesliga’s questions.
Who’s going to try beat three men off the dribble?
Jaden Sancho.
Who’s going to play no-look slide rule passes into the 18 yard box?
Jaden Sancho.
Who’s going to lift the Meisterschale in spring?
Jaden Sancho.
We hope.
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The night is like warm velvet around them. The stars, burning diamond in the cloudless sky, turn the road beneath their feet a silver grey. The University and Imre are the hearts of understanding and art, the strongest of the four corners of civilization. Here on the road between the two there is nothing but old trees and long grass bending to the wind. The night is perfect in a wild way, almost terrifyingly beautiful.
The three boys, one dark, one light, and one-for lack of a better word-fiery, do not notice the night. Perhaps some part of them does, but they are young and drunk, and busy knowing deep in their hearts that they will ever grow old or die. They also know that they are friends, and they share a certain love that will never leave them. The boys know many other things, but none of them seem as important as this. Perhaps they are right.
The Name of the Wind. By Patrick Rothfuss, pg 412, chapter 59What Patrick describes here is that one perfect night in your twenties, when you and your buddies are coming home from a night on the town.
The only missing part of the description is a Waffle House.
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A comic tends to be a small enough, personal enough, medium that a creator can just make art, tell stories, and see if anyone wants to read them. Not having to be liked is enormously liberating. The comic is, joyfully, a bastard medium that has borrowed its vocabulary and ideas from literature, science fiction, poetry, fine art, diaries, film, and illustration. It would be nice to think that comics, and those of us who come from a comics background, bring something special to film. An insouciance, perhaps, or a willingness to do our learning and experimenting in public.
Neil Gaiman, The View from the cheap seats, On Comics and Films: 2006. Pg 224.I won’t lie here. I did have to look up insouciance.
Floodlights and Goalposts 