I was searching for some background material to help inform a post I’m going to write about the movie “The Dark Knight,” which I just watched on DVD on Friday. Strangely enough, as I was searching the LA Times Web site for an interview they did with director Christopher Nolan, I found this front-page photo of Barack Obama and Jesse Jackson Jr. Check out the insignia on the pocket of Jackson’s shirt.

I wonder if he’s wearing Batman Underroos as well.

I think I said this post will be about a cool outlining tool I’ve discovered but I decided instead to post some sketches. Hey, it’s my blog. Besides, I think I have at most about ten readers so I’m not in danger of disappointing vast swaths of the public.

The sketches below are called gestures. Gestures are quick drawings, often done in as little as one minute. They are intended not to capture a perfect likeness but instead to record the essence of a pose.

Gesture drawing is a great learning tool but I hated doing them when I was in college. I would always end up with page upon page of clumsy marks that added up to nothing. When I began attending Steve Carpenter’s weekly Figure Drawing Open Studio in Rochester, N.Y., I ran into the same brick wall trying to capture the one-minute poses that start off the session.

I decided to buckle down and practice gesture drawing at home. I start off every drawing session with a drill consisting of 20 one-minute gesture sketches. I don’t have access to live models (my girlfriend is not fond of modeling for me, even clothed; and my cats get up and move at inopportune times). I do, however, have many reference books filled with photos of models both nude and clothed and they’re useful enough for those times a model isn’t available.

The practice has paid off. My gesture drawings have definitely improved and I hope to utilize the knowledge gained to improve my finished drawings as well.

Here are a few samples of my most recent gestures (for those wondering, these were done with conté pencil on newsprint):

On Oct. 31 I announced a “Contest for Creative Types” with great fanfare. It was inspired by writer/illustrator Colleen Doran’s participation in the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), and by Laurie Sutton who posted a comment in Colleen’s blog suggesting that those of us who post there regularly could hold a contest in a similar vein. I volunteered to host it, and Colleen was kind enough to promote the idea in her own blog.

The rules were simple: pick a creative project, set a goal, and then check in weekly with your progress. Unfortunately, I made almost no progress for the first few weeks and then on Nov. 20 I was laid off from my job. The whole thing kinda went to hell from there.

In retrospect, aside from losing my job (which is no small thing, I assure you) the bigger issue for me was that I had set the wrong goal for myself. The objective of NaNoWriMo is for participants to write 50,000 words in one month, with little or no editing. The idea is to encourage people to stop procrastinating and start writing. I tried to apply that to drawing: I was going to complete four pages of “The Victory Streak” from start to finish.

The thing is, I have attention deficit disorder (ADD) and thoughts tend to come cascading out of my brain in a hurry. Excessive planning has never been my problem. It’s been the opposite. Like most ADD’ers, I’m impatient as hell. I want to immediately capture whatever’s in my head on a piece of paper. I’ve written many a story without doing an ounce of planning, and drawn many a comic-book page the same way. And I’ve run into the same roadblocks time and again as a result.

I don’t need to do more brain-dumps-on-the-page. I’m really, really good at that. I need to learn how to harness and structure all of these thoughts buzzing around in my brain, separating the good ones from the ones I should let go, and refining the good ones into something worth sharing.

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been working on outlining the backstory for “The Victory Streak” and the first issue’s plot. I can’t share that outline with you, obviously. But I can share with you a cool tool I discovered that makes the outlining process easy and even fun. I’ll do that in my next post.

After that, I’ll be posting my first attempt to ink a penciled comic-book page (drawn by me, natch) with a brush. The page itself isn’t much to look at, but along with it I’ll be recounting my (mis)adventure in the land of comic-book inking. I think (or at least hope) it will prove entertaining.

I also have a few sketches I’ll share in yet another post. I’ve stepped back from penciling my comic-book for the moment in order to learn some of the fundamentals that are missing from my drawings. The results have been interesting. I may not be giving Michelangelo’s ghost reason to worry about his place in history, but I’m having fun and learning something.

So, that’s that. Next post will probably be tomorrow, because earlier this week I purchased “The Dark Knight” on DVD and am eager to finally watch the movie. Before you ask, no, I did not see it in a theater; and no, I have not been living under a rock all this time.

‘Night, all.