Painting Fine-Art Cartoons in Oils - Enchanted Images

the layout drawing
“much work has to be done on such layouts. the
position of every element, even each coin, must be
carefully studied.”
Carl Barks (FA, 53)
All of the craft that Barks
would have put into a painting
up to this point – the
narrative and dynamically
symmetrical approaches to
composition, the collectery
approach to detail, the cartoon-ality
approach to research
and reference – would
have culminated in the
layout drawing. Probably the
single most important step
in Barks’s painting craft, the
layout drawing contained
the ideas, the characters, the
setting and the story, all set
out in the tightest possible
drawing.
To achieve these tight drawings,
Barks used vellum and
tissue paper to revise and refine
the layouts for his paintings.
These are examples
of Barks’s drawings for two
of his “little girl” paintings,
a series of small, 8” x 10”
portrait studies that Barks
167
worked on in the 1960s.
Using a light table, Barks
would place a sheet of vellum
over his rough sketch, which
was used as a guide for the
final drawing. Vellum was
also useful for experimenting
with different compositional
elements. The Barks
estate turned up numerous
examples of these geometric
background drawings which
could be used with any of the
little girl figures.
Barks used vellum and
tissue paper to refine
his rough drawings.
Here are a number of
layout drawings for
his little girl paintings,
done in 1967: “Fancy
Stranger” (19-67,
above left); “Black-
Eyed Susan” (18-67,
above right).