Sunday, February 22

A Rob Liefeld Education


I love the fact that every time Rob Liefeld is interviewed at Newsarama.com or any news is released that has anything to do with him, a creation of his, or one of his past antics...you can rest assured that he will be in the comments section fighting fanboys and commentors alike.

I have never been a particular fan of Liefeld's personally.... But I have always found his work to be inspiring. It inspires me to work harder... and most importantly...teaches me to Never let my ego get in the way of my growth as an artist.

I think the most important thing any artist can learn to do is never consider themselves done learning. Never stop trying to improve. If you spend all day working on a project, and some small part of the drawing keeps drawing your attention away from it as a whole...then there probably is a reason. It is easy to say "its been a long day..its good enough" or even worse "they get what they pay for". But anytime you decide that something isnt just "your style"...but admit that you could have done better, you have already grown as an artist. Being an artist has been described as the constant pursuit of perfection. Plato explained that all things represent an attempt to create perfection. He used the example of the "perfect chair". That all chairs are an individuals attempt to create the perfect chair. They represent whatever attributes that one particular person interprets as perfect for that particular chair.

As artist we work with this same problem. We each pursue the perfect form of anything we draw. We see an image in our head, and try to recreate that on paper. That is our pursuit of perfection. When we are first starting out, we are held back by inexperience, lack of technique, and more importatnly a lack of significant failures. When I fail...I get embarrassed. I hate embarrassment. But when we take the easy way out...we avoid chances of failure by keeping things simple. And thus we cheapen the product.

This is what Rob has taught me. Sure...you can cut corners and focus on the more flashy distractions that are so easy to get caught up in when it comes to comics and comic art. But eventually....on a long enough timeline....it WILL catch up to you. And twenty years later...when the art is still saying the same thing it did before, how much closer to that perfection have you come?

Ill keep trying for mine.

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