so I did...
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!
Side projects... and a kitten!
Happy Monday everyone!
This is more of a crafty post than an illustration sort of entry, but I do think it will be worth it. So if you think you can handle it, read on for overwhelming cuteness.
It has been quite a busy weekend... one spent, for the most part, squeeee-ing over a tiny, fuzzy, handful of kitten. On Friday, I adopted a kitten that a friend found on a walk around her neighborhood. After the kitten crawled out of the bushes, she brought him over to the vet, who, following a week of check-ups, gave him a clean bill of health. I went out to Long Island to meet him on Friday and just couldn't say no. With a face like this
how could I?!
I was out visiting my folks for my dad's birthday this weekend, so the kitten ended up hanging out with the whole family. He is super friendly and just wanted to be around people all day, so with a bit of tucking here-and-there I engineered a makeshift kangaroo pouch out of a belt and an apron. It left me free for frosting-making and birthday-cake assembly.
Later, when it came time to head back to Brooklyn, I realized that the little kitten had grown accustomed to sleeping on carpet and couches. My apartment has one rather uncomfortable, heinous love seat and no carpet at all, so I thought it might be nice for him to have somewhere comfy to catnap... when he's not sleeping in my lap, that is...
Anywho, if you can tear your eyes from the extreme cuteness above, there is actually a photo of the craft project just below. Using a discarded cardboard box, a bag of old fabric scraps, some polyfill, and a bunch of hot glue and duct tape, I engineered a makeshift bed for the little bear.
A little lumpy, but he seemed to think it was pretty swell.
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."
More Secrets! New Website Design!
Hello lovely people!
So following last week's super secret project, it's been back to work on the book project. I finished-ish a new spread for the book... as in the majority of the painting is done, so now I hang it on my studio wall, stare at it for a couple of days/nights/weeks and try to figure out what's wrong/what it needs until my eyes go crossed and buggy and I either smoosh some more paint on it, or with a sigh of resignation, add it to the ever-growing pile of mostly-finished spreads. I also figured out a sketch that I am semi-content with for one of the two remaining spreads. That being said, I will probably sketch another bucket full of thumbnails, throw them all out, but perhaps, perchance, just maaaaybe come up with one I like better. We shall see... so the book project is wrapping up, albeit rather slowly.
But in other news, I am giving my website a major-for-serious-redo-everything sort of overhaul. The design of my current website is severely lacking, so at the end of last term, I had come up with a new idea that I started to implement. I tried to work further on it, but eventually decided that I was just getting waaaay waaaaaaay too complicated... and in true Lisa fashion, I scrapped the whole thing, including, quite sadly the little owl lamp (see "Sneak Preview" post for the animation) and the following teacup -
and just because I love it... the owl lamp again...
Alas...
But! But! I sat at my drawing table all week and once again after scrapping sixteen and a half different ideas, did a redesign for the whole site that I think will eventually be pretty sweet. I've spent most of the week working on it.
And thus I give you... sneak preview!
Super Secret Project Follow-Up
Just wanted to post a quick follow-up to my previous post because the surprise was a seriously-super-spectacular success! Grin!
Not to mention, there is one birdy that didn't make it onto the last post... the one I kept:
Secret Projects! Shhhh!
Halloo all!
Happy sweaty-warm weather! I hope you're all enjoying the weather warming... admittedly, not my favorite thing in the world. Don't get me wrong - I do enjoy the summer months. However, I am not overly fond of being hot or sweaty or as is often the case for me, vaguely sun-burnt despite buckets and vats of SPF 70+. Regardless, summer means parks and picnics and ice-cream, so go play outside!
I've spent only a bit of time enjoying the weather. There has been a bit of apartment flux chez moi (a petit move and two lovely new roommates), and then family whatnot and a secret project of sorts have taken over these past few weeks, severely limiting both outdoor free time and time in the studio. As such, the book project is inching along, snail-style. (Though I am nearing completion on a new spread... it was too wet to finish tonight, so a couple of finishing touches tomorrow should do it.)
But back to the secret project! A certain singer in a band just moved to Greenpoint from Jersey (about time!), and I thought it appropriate to welcome him back to the five boroughs with a little bit of ridiculousness.
So I wracked my little school-tired brains and began doodling... what to do for a band dude? I let my pen wander across the page. The doodles started with guitars... and then all of a sudden the guitars had wings... and then they had beaks... and little legs... GUITARBIRDS! YES!
No eye-rolling. You know you love the ridiculousness.
So the sketch... please note the infinitely awkward upside-down guitarbirdy on the bottom... that definitely did not make the cut...
Once I had a sketch, I started in on my little birdies, using a brush pen (ink) to draw them and then adding color with light washes. At first my idea was to just hang the little birdies all over the room... BUT... if I were a little guitarbirdy, I would most certainly want something to land on. TREEEEEES! Yes! So I cut a bit off my enormous roll of drawing paper, taped it up on the wall, and started inking trees with the same brush pen I used for the birdies.
And then the super sneaky bit... I checked Band-Boy's cellphone for his roommate's phone numbers, wrote them down on the post-it... which I promptly lost. Groan. But I had email addresses! Success! One of his roommate's let me in before his scheduled move-in, and here's what happened.
This - blank wall, roll of paper trees, and a carefully concealed flock of guitarbirdies sandwiched in my copy of Will Eisner's "Comics & Sequential Art" (an excellent read, btw) - is what I had to work with:
Yes, I worked barefoot... it's summer. 'Nuf said.
Step one: Flattened and attached the first tree with a bit of painter's tape, wrapping it around the corner of the wall, and congratulated self on excellent match of white paper and white wall:
Step two: Attached the rest of the branches and stepped back to admire handiwork:
Step three: Chose and attached the first birdie:
And then the whole family:
And a friend:
Step four: Started populating left branches, checking every now and then to make sure birdies were fairly evenly balanced in number and color:
Step five: Danced around the room like a fool, excited by crafty handiwork... and took many photos:
Left:
Right:
Details and characters:
(The little banjos and the pink-red acoustic family are probably my favorites... I kept only one of the birdies - the third little acoustic guitarbirdling.)
Step six: Added little hints of the ridiculousness hidden behind the door:
Finishing touches:
Wait for it... wait for it...
And without further ado, I give you the final product...
Wee! AWESOMENESS!
So there you have it. I actually wrote this post up right after I did my super-stealthy-guitarbird-hanging-caper but had to save it so as to keep it a secret. Whew, secret project-tastic. And with that I shall leave you, dear readers. Hopefully this bit of absurdity will tide you over until I finish the next couple of spreads for my book. For more photos or perhaps your own custom wall paper, feel free to drop a line. ;)
PS You should absolutely check out the band - Diehard - because they're pretty fab. They have some shows coming up both in NY and elsewhere on the East coast during their summer tour. If you're interested, let me know. I'll probably head to at least one of the NY shows.
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