Showing posts with label comic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label comic. Show all posts
Issue One - Hey Girl Here: Sweet Gear For Salty Tarts
Halloo dear readers!
Today marked the release of the first issue of "Hey Girl Here", a little homemade zine by my sassy and saucy lady classmates at SVA. It's fab, and we're hoping to do a whole bunch more issues.
It was an amazingly quick turn-around... less than a week from original idea to stapled zine.
Assembly line production:
Snazzy pink cover (hand-lettering, courtesy of the talented Mz. Supinski):
Comic Feature!
Hey there everyone!
I've been so intensely immersed in prepping for the book show, the comic class already feels ages ago. Regardless, Jessica Abel (one of the professors of my summer comic class and author of the graphic novel La Perdida and the how-to book Drawing Words, Writing Pictures) wrote a feature on her blog about the work I did this summer. Woah!
Take a looksee!
Special thanks to Jessica for the great spotlight article and of course to her, Tom and Keith for an incredible summer class.
August and Everything
And it's August.
Dear readers, I have been entirely delinquent with my summer updates, but the comic class has kept me so busy that there has been time for little else. Excuses, excuses... I know. But to give you an idea, since class last Tuesday, I worked seven days this past week, putting in 12 hours on Wednesday, 10 on Thursday, 6 on Friday, 6 on Saturday, 8 on Sunday, and - for the final push - 12+ yesterday.
And now it's over.
For the final critique today, we had to have our projects, not only finished, but printed and bound into mini-comics. I'm not even going to go into the craziness that was yesterday, which involved Milton Glaser, not one but two defunct Staples, two small copy shops (one closed, one nearly closed), $8 worth of 11x17 paper that I couldn't even use, and finally a heroic rescue by my dear roommate's wonderful little (albeit oddly calibrated) printer. But as I said, it's over, and as such, I figured time for a long overdue post. (I'm giving you fair warning, this is a long post, but it is image-heavy... so consider yourselves thusly prepared...)
In my last post, I talked a bit about process and page 1 (now 3) of my comic, and I have the final version of that page to show you. When we last left off, I talked about inking and reworking my style to better fit the story. To recap... I redid my first page entirely. The first inking looked something like this:
And then the entire page was revised to better advance the story. The sketch for the revised page:
And... drum roll pleeeeease... the final inked version of this page:
Clearly I didn't just go from straight pencils to 4,209,302,125 inked in bricks. There was definitely a stage of very simple outlines followed by a second stage with some hesitant, very tentative gray hatched lines... One of my greatest weaknesses has always been adding enough darks into a black and white piece - both solid black and darker grey tones. I struggled with this during the course of the class and through the inking process... but Jessica, Tom, and Keith were an amazing help. Each week we brought in photocopies to pass out to our classmates for workshopping. Tom suggested that I take the left over photocopies and use them for experimenting. I took his advice and - for a bunch of the pages - scribbled in loads of ink and pencil, trying to find where best to add spots of dark before ever touching the final piece.
For example:
On (actual) page 1, I first started playing just with thicker outlines around some of the faces to try to pop them out of the page. I realized, however, that I wanted a much darker feeling to the piece. A darker outline wasn't going to cut it.
So I took a pencil and scribbled away...
Much better. So with a little bit of courage and a somewhat shaky hand to start out, I grabbed a pen and my good paper...
Another process set... on page four, here's a brief progression from pencils:
To the final page:
1. No drawing is precious. Many a panel will be sacrificed to the gods of storytelling (even if it means - very sadly - cutting a choice scene of your main character pole vaulting ninja-style over a bunch of bear traps and another that you might love for no good reason at all, except maybe that it reminds you of an old school Alice in Wonderland illustration)...
If they don't help the story, out they go.
2. Don't be afraid of the dark...
3. Or the grays...
The end.
Comics and Graphic Novels: Process Work
Happy hot weather dear readers!
Apologies for the month long hiatus. My weekly workload has left little time for anything other than actual homework. This week, however, I seem to be on track with my assignment and thus find myself with an iota of extra time for an update.
The comic class has been crazy intense but amazing. Tom, Jessica, and Keith are great teachers who give great feedback. Each week we have two pages to pencil and a third to ink - read: buckets of work. But!! Because of the heavy workload, I'm nearly through a ten page mini-comic that will eventually serve as the introduction or prequel to a graphic novel for kids.
The first step in the process was a series of thumbnails - essentially ten detailed pages laying out the entire story. After a first round of editing, I ended up completely revising my story and thumbnails, redrawing them entirely. In the new version, I condensed the first three pages into one. With only ten pages for the entire story, I had to find a better - read, more concise - way to communicate the beginning.
Page 1
Page 2
Page 3
New page 1!
After the revisions, I transferred this initial thumbnail (drawn on regular computer paper) onto a piece of 14 x 17 bristol board and tightened up the original sketch in pencil. (Apologies... the quality of this image isn't great... the erasing leaves some smudgy bits on the paper.)
Next step: inking!
Never having inked anything before, I decided to try inking the page using a brush.
First I drew in borders and began laying in any text.
And after all of the text was in, I began inking the rest of the drawing.
Until finally:
Having never inked anything before, I was unsure about the washes and shading. Ultimately I decided to stop here and bring the page to class for some advice before continuing. It wasn't a bad decision. Because of the feedback from both my teachers and classmates, I actually ended up reorganizing the comic a second time in order to better tell the story. This page will still show up in the final version, but as the third page rather than the first. Likewise, when I inked the second page, I did so in an entirely different style - with a nib rather than a brush - that I believe works better for the overall mood of the story. The style works better, but it meant that I woud have to redo the whole page. But again, not a bad thing at all. I think the new page tells the story better than the old one. I haven't quite finished with the pencils for this page (you can still see some perspective lines I need to work out in the first panel), but here is the page in progress:
So there's a little peek into the comic process. I've never done a comic before; it's been a lot of fun, but it is so soo sooooooo much work. There is a ton of drawing and refining in each and every page, and the pace is grueling. That being said, I am definitely learning a ton, not only about comics, but also about my own process - how I work and how I draw - and likewise about using ink with both a nib and a brush.
And speaking of that ink and brush... now, dear readers, I should get back to my drawing board.
Until next time!
Comics and Graphic Novels oh my!
Good afternoon dear readers.
Despite the gawdawful hot weather last week and a marvelous visit from out-of-town friends, I've been slowly but surely getting work done. The website work continues, and there will be further updates to come, of course. In the meantime, however, I want to tell you about my summer class.
I've always been interested in graphic novel and comic art and opted to take an eight-week course on comic illustration this summer. It's intense; we meet for six hours every Tuesday, and the goal for the course is to end up with a 10 page mini-comic in addition to weekly assignments. (The homework for this week alone was eight chapters of reading and ten pages of original sketches.) The first class was great - there were ten of us in the classroom: five undergrads, two grad students, and three teachers (Jessica Abel, Keith Mayerson, and Tom Harte - all amazing comic/graphic novel artists) - and after the requisite hello-my-name-is, we covered a pretty solid introduction to comic illustration. Finally during the last hour of class, we took a trip down to MOCCA, the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (if you've never been, I definitely recommend a trip). It was a crazy intense but excellent first day.
Since last Tuesday, I've already been challenged a few times for taking the class. If I do picture books, why turn now to comics and graphic novels? Well, dear reader, I shall tell you. I decided to take the class because I've been searching for a way to tell older stories. Of course I'm still doing quite a bit of writing, but I had hoped to find a visual medium for these stories... as such, I turned to graphic novels, thinking that perhaps I could explore some of my ideas (for an older audience) in this way.
And yet... despite wanting to tell "older"/"more mature" stories, my first inclination and often my most coherent and developed ideas are for kids. Hmm...
Tom's advice was to go with our first instinct for the mini-comic. It was excellent advice, and I've been working all week on a comic geared for kids based on an idea that came to me in April. I thought it might be interesting to post some of the first early sketches.
On the subway one morning this past April, I drew this guy:
Which led me to this sketch:
That same day, I came up with a second character:
And I started to get to know her a little bit:
And then for whatever reason, I found myself doodling a couple pages of rats:
Getting to know how my characters might interact:
And finally from these character sketches, a story started to emerge:
And thus, The Peddler and the Storyteller:
All of the sketches posted above are from April and May. It wasn't until the class on Tuesday that I began to think that they might do very well as the subject for my mini-comic. Their story is ultimately going to be much longer than 10 pages, but this may very well serve as the introduction to the larger book. So I started attempting and experimenting some scribbly sketches of possible layouts:
I have the first eight pages of preliminary sketches done. Two more to go before tomorrow, so I shall leave you all now and return to my drawing board. Have a lovely week everyone. Until next time!
*That particular page of my journal features a marvelous passage from a book of short stories by Neil Gaiman:
"[It] occurs to me that the peculiarity of most things we think of as fragile is how tough they truly are. There were tricks we did with eggs, as children, to show how they were, in reality, tiny load-bearing marble halls; while the beat of the wings of a butterfly in the right place, we are told, can create a hurricane across an ocean. Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkably difficult to kill.
"Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds' eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas--abstract, invisible, gone once they've been spoken--and what could be more frail than that? But some stories, small, simple tales of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created."
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