Nagel and Me
One of the things that people often say about my drawings is that they reminded them to some comic artist that I don’t know or that it looks like Patrick Nagel stuff (or something from Jem and the Holograms, but that is a conversation for another time) .
In case you don’t know about Patrick Nagel, he was an American artist in the 80’s that drew stuff like this:
Cover of Duran Duran’s Rio Album.
Now, here is the thing. I didn’t really got into Nagel’s work until 2017.
Like I said in my first post, I started working professionally in 2010 (before that I just did stuff for free) doing mostly comics. The style I was doing back then was more similar to what I used to the styles of comic artists in my country (or at least I tried to do similar stuff) So I was doing more suff like this:
Panel of Berserker, from 2015
You can check it out here: https://tapas.io/series/Berserker
So, what happened was that I wanted to do pages faster and I remembered that a couple of years before that, I was working on a simpler style (this was pre digital era) The first of those drawings was this:
Pencil drawing from 2012
I tough of just going full anime style, since that was how I use to draw back in my “amateur” days (will post some of those old comics one day) but I was too much into wanting to draw like the people I admire, the more realistic artists like Ernesto Garcia Seijas, so I didn’t go that route. Decided to just work on this style.
Ernesto Garcia Seijas drawing of El Negro Blanco characters. A comic that was published in a popular newspaper in Argentina in the late 80’s and early 90’s (also published in Italy and some stuff on Heavy Metal in the US)
What are the changes that I did? I simplified the eyelashes on women faces, went from a lot, to just 3 and eventually to 1 (sometimes i do a couple more if I feel like it) Eliminated expression lines in women. Simplified the eyebrows, the hair and changed the way I did hair shading ( not a lot, more like cleaned it up a little). Also stopped doing cross hatching and went for more black shadows.
Now during that time I was starting doing 80’s inspired stuff for fun more often. I went looking for 80’s art and it was there that I found Patrick Nagel. I already saw some of his stuff before off course but never paid attention to it. So I decided to try something in that style.
This one is called “La Epoca de Sentir” I used it for a banner of a Facebook group of 80’s nostalgia.
After that I took some stuff from him and added it to my drawings.
Finally I did drew a couple of episodes of berserker on that more simplified style but it isn’t published yet. In time I went back to doing some of the stuff I dropped back then.
That’s pretty much it. Nagel wasn’t that much of an influence as some people believe. It was more like “This is similar to what I’m doing, let’s see what I can take from it”
Next post will probably the Jem thing.
Bye and thanks for reading.
