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Pictures intended to be read

Anyone who knows me, knows that I’m a huge fan of the comics artist Chris Ware. His art is extremely geometric and precise, full of straight lines and hard angles, and exceptionally detailed.

His sketches, however, are the opposite: rough, organic, and loose. Most artists show  significant differences between sketch and final piece, but rarely is it as shockingly distinct as in Ware’s work.

His explanation is that in comics “pictures are intended to be read“. He considered the distinction between ‘handwritten’ and ‘typeset’, where the former dictates a certain personality to the message, leading him to try to create a typeset style of drawing aimed at making the reader less aware of the art and more of the story.

He describes this as “seeing without seeing”.