I’ve always been fascinated by the soap opera comics which are a feature of American newspapers. Sometimes the drawings for these strips are amazing, in the best comic book tradition, and sometimes they are just plain awful, with wooden figures and little thought to variation in values, creating a believable space, etc. The anti-gravity breasts adorning the female characters in Judge Parker caught my eye yesterday, so I looked up the artist, Mike Manley. (Who doesn’t wish they could say ‘up yours’ to gravity now and again?)

Maybe not the acme of sequential art, but it piqued my interest. It turns out that Mike Manley is doing a MFA at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art in Philadelphia, and even better, has been blogging about his classes going all the way back to 2009. PAFA is a fantastic school, and I remember loving the book on Alla Prima painting that our library acquired a couple of years ago.

So thanks to the magic of blogging, we can follow Mike as he builds an ecorche figure from the skeleton up! Follow Mike as a goes to the museum and the zoo to do drawings of animals! Follow Mike as he paints from life! Follow Mike in his studio! It’s actually really great stuff watching his learning process, and maybe I can get some benefit from reading without the $34,000 per year price tag for tuition there. My favourite part of his blog is when he talks about the teaching, and his tutors’ feedback. As for Mike himself, it’s interesting to watch his progress over the course of four years, particularly as he takes on the ‘academy style,’ I’m not sure how intentionally. On the one hand, I love that sort of thing. On the other hand, I find it depressing how all of these artists paint so similarly. If I had the opportunity, I would love every minute of being taught how to do it, because I’m a geek, but I don’t think I would ever go down that road. I don’t want my work to look like it came off the salon conveyor belt. And I don’t want to lose the excitement of discovery for myself.