A few weeks ago the Near Sighted Monkey, Lynda Barry, was talking about a drawing technique she learned from Art Spiegelman. Who is Art Spiegelman, I wondered? So I looked him up.

His ground-breaking book Maus is critically acclaimed. It tells the story of his father’s experience of surviving the WWII Nazi holocaust in comic book form. The Jews are drawn as mice and the Nazis as cats. I saw the book in my son’s school library when I was there for a school board meeting, so I asked him to check the book out for me. I read it over this past weekend.

The thing I noticed right away about Spiegelman’s art is his attention to detail. Every frame has a background. We get a complete feel for the environment his characters are living in.

For more understanding, I decided to copy a frame in my sketchbook. Here is the result of that effort.

I spent a long on this one frame, maybe a whole hour. I decided that I’m going to start working on drawing better backgrounds. Here is a new picture I drew yesterday and inked in this morning.