Sienkiewicz sketch cards.

You should come and visit me in Brooklyn, David.

I remember when Bill Sienkiewicz first took over on New Mutants. I hated him. He was ruining everything. No one looked like anyone anymore. No one looked like anything anymore. It was awful.

I have no idea how long it took for him to become one of my favourite artists. But when it hit, it hit hard.

Problem is, I'm still highly literal when it comes to my own stuff. I still don't see any option other than drawing what I see. My warmup work is technically more energetic--the pencil barely comes off the paper, and it's all about carving the shape and the anatomy out of the white space, but I could never make one of those into a finished piece, much less a likeness, which Bill clearly can.

I just can't process when emotion says "I know what you see--I know that the neck is such and such a proportion of the width of the head, but this time, make it narrower." That just makes no sense to my pencil.

I can get as far as choice of techniques and media (although I'm limited), and I can see the impact of choices of palette, (though since I don't work in colour it's less relevant to me), but not actual form. Don't know how to make that step.

Looking good, Brooklyn! Wish I could visit, Tom.

Don't know how to make that step.

In my experience, style in any medium derives from mastery. After a certain level of high competence you have the confidence to let more of your shit hang out.

Though that's not always true - some people have distinctive style right out of the gate. The way they sing or write or draw or play is just always an extension of their personality.

Cash and I were talking on FB the other day about a new book out on creativity by a writer from Wired who looks at all the neurological studies to get at how the brain achieves insight and breakthrough.

The part of your brain that processes jokes and metaphors is also where you get sudden leap "Aha!" moments. Making connections that aren't linear but intuit the bigger pattern.

There was also a lot about shutting off the impulse control part of your brain. The part that says, "Don't do that!" They did a lot of studies on improv comics and jazz musicians and discussed the notion of Getting Out Of Your Head (which is a specific warm up exercise that comics do at Second City).

This [link] is a good example of the way Roy Krenkel worked. He would do sketch after sketch of the thing he was working on, and break it down into bits. One time, he was obsessed with wagon wheels, because he didn't like how the ones in something he was working on looked. He had piles of reference material of other artists' wagon wheels, and pages covered with wagons and wagon wheels. He did all these sketches really fast, but he did hundreds for any one drawing. (He was also notorious for being late.)

Here's the book, Imagine: How Creativity Works.

Lehrer was interviewed on NPR (how Cash and I heard about it) and he sounds so much like Rob Morrow when he was Dr. Fleischer on Northern Exposure it was ridiculous. And he was popping open a Diet Coke and swigging it during the entire interview.

Well, I presume it was a Diet Coke. He seemed like a Diet Coke guy.

There was also a lot about shutting off the impulse control part of your brain. The part that says, "Don't do that!" They did a lot of studies on improv comics and jazz musicians and discussed the notion of Getting Out Of Your Head (which is a specific warm up exercise that comics do at Second City).

One of Oliver Sacks's books had a chapter called "Witty Ticcy Ray" about a man with Tourette's who had a fairly ordinary day job but played in a jazz band on the weekends, and, after a few years of fiddling with his meds, decided to take weekends off -- his weekday self depended on the stability of unvarying routine, but his playing was freer, more swinging and more responsive to his bandmates' improvisations when he loosed the neuro tethers the meds put on him.

Unrelated to my art plight: Does anyone here believe that men can't be feminists? Or is anyone here familiar enough with that position that they can explain it to me?

style in any medium derives from mastery

But what I'm saying is that expressing style in a medium is not the issue. Expressing style outside of medium is what flummoxes me. Expressing it in form is where I'm taken aback. Bill's obviously a master of the pen. That's not a question. But he also makes decisions about how to depict the human form that I can't make my own version of, because I look at people, and I'm doing my best to represent the proportions and relationships I see there.

Because tonight is the season finale of Archer and Sunday is the season premiere of Mad Men, I need to remind you all of the awesomeness which is Sterling Archer Draper Pryce.