Comic book characters

Was always fascinated by comic books.
When you look back, its probably because of the visual treat that you get while reading a story. And I was more fascinated by the quality of the drawings that were produced in these old comic books.

Some of the illustrations that I liked were those of Phantom, Rip Kirby, Tarzan & Mandrake the magician. The illustrations were three dimensional when compared to Tin Tin & Astrix which were two dimensional.

Not that Tin Tin and Astrix were bad. In fact my pseudo name in this blog Haddock is my favorite character Captain Haddock from Tin Tin.

I was so fascinated by Rip Kirby that I decided to draw the character Rip by magnifying it ten times. So I set about the task of drawing grid lines (in pencil) on the comic book and painstakingly reproducing it. Once I was satisfied, I inked it with a simple black sketch pen. This was done about 25 years ago.

Once I realised that I could do this enlargement bit, I tried it out on another character from the same comic book (I don’t remember her name) but it did not turn out so well. So I stopped it at that and dropped Desmond (Rip’s butler) from being enlarged. (poor Desmond)

Now that I started dabbling with Photoshop, I thought of doing the same in the soft form. Tracing my original work in Photoshop took some time and I must say there are many things that I have yet to learn when it comes to these software tools.
After all learning is a continuous process.

Coming back to reading, I think the best thing that happens when you read a book is that you start to visualize the scene in your mind. But when you watch TV that freedom is curbed as you are forced to “see” the scene that is depicted on the screen.

No wonder they say “What a treasure of books” The treasure is not the books but the freedom of visualization.