The Practice of Smiling

Today's brief is a group project to create a landscape from imagination. We chose the unifying theme of exploring how different cultures deal with death. It's fascinating to me how death can be used either to celebrate the beauty of life or mourn the eternal tragedy of the mortal coil. We all chose a culture for our individual images, from Ancient Egyptian mythology to the Mexican Day of the Dead tradition. I chose Victorian Gothic, because I'm a needlessly dour individual who idolises being gaunt and feeling like an outsider. Anyway, I set to work with ink sketches of real life Victorian cemeteries from online reference images.

I like idea of using a faux-naive drawing style that depicts the setting with a simplicity that conveys feeling over realism, and black ink seemed the obvious choice to associate with the monochrome photographs of the era.

This was my submission for an actual imagined landscape. I'm not fond of it. The composition's kind of interesting, but it lacks vision and I can't help wanting to make something more refined. It really needs some explicitly fantastical elements to make it memorable because right now it's just dull. Knowing me, I'll no doubt find the time to develop this morbid concept into something more worthy of audiences' eyes.

Portrait of the Artist as a Would-Be Graphic Novelist

Nearly finished with my short, but first here's a run-down of the production process:

It all starts with the script. Actually, it all starts with half-formed ideas in the back of my head while I try and get to sleep at night, then moves into scribbled pocketbook pages in hotel bathrooms, but the script is the first step towards actualising the idea. I'm not great at writing prose, but it helps to solidify the concept into something that can be translated into its final form. If it's a complex idea (this wasn't), additional notes and scene cards are helpful to break the story. Depending on how well it stands, more than one draft might be necessary. This one seemed to read pretty well from page one, so I went straight from the initial draft to the next stage: thumbnailing.

Okay, I cheated. These thumbs are from another project because I left the others at my parents' house. They look pretty similar; quick sketches conveying only the most basic actions, framing and camera placement for reference later. I tend to not bother adding in dialogue at this point, leaving only empty speech balloons to indicate what's being said. When this is out the way, it's on to the next step: penciling.

Going through the thumbs alongside a copy of the script, I begin to make a basic build of the page in Manga Studio. This one is a splash page showing the emotional conflict between the two principal characters during sex. I decided to illustrate this with a large opening panel establishing the scene, then fragment the narrative into little details and actions at the bottom of each page. It's still really rough at this stage, so what follows is the long and arduous process of drawing and redrawing each panel until I'm satisfied with the result.

At some point I decided to flip the action so that it reads more effectively left to right. This seemed a good idea because the page in question involves the character making advances rather than stopping an action, and I wanted this to be reflected in the way it reads.

This is what the final penciled image looks like. Pretty refined, but still obviously a digital product. That's why we have the next stage: Inking.

After printing off the original pages (they have to be separated for this step because my printer-scanner is only A4), usually at reduced opacity to aid line removal later, I then go through and ink by hand. Screwing up at this point is pretty much inevitable, but it's okay because once it's done there's still one more step: post production.

In Photoshop, I combine the two images, remove the blue pencil lines, add text, and fix any blemishes or uneven lines that look especially glaring. Looks pretty neat, huh? Well the next stage is colouring, but that's not being done until the last few pages are inked up to maintain consistency within the artwork. 

So there you have it: the (almost) complete process. As much as I love drawing beards and butts, I'll be glad when this project is out of the way. There's so much more I want to get out and create.

Eulogies for Broken Worlds

Harrow's End, London. E. H. Underwood arrives home after a correctional stay in a juvenile psychiatric infirmary. Bereft of pleasure, pain or personality, he wanders empty rooms and city streets in search of what he lost amidst those endless hallways and examination rooms. Instead he finds Angelica Morton, a dead seventeen year-old who never speaks except through scribbled Moleskine pages. Their powerful bond becomes his desperate means of refuge, but Angelica has problems of her own. Problems that could threaten everyone she holds dear, including him...

Starting to piece this one together from my fragmented imagination. The plotting is almost finished, though some scenes still need reshuffling and it could do with more detail in a few areas, and then it's on to the first draft of the script. This one requires a lot more devotion to research than Ayiline; the world is bigger, the characters more complex and the lore richer. It's a character drama grounded in the Gothic horror genre, but taking place in a hybrid of Victorian/Edwardian/contemporary London. I want to convey this sort of timeless feel, but throw in some modern iconography enhance the fantasy aspect of the narrative. Think period dress mixed with digital watches, because I'm in love with the idea of anachronistic weirdness interfering with an otherwise straightforward tale of death and despair.

If I can reconcile all these jumbled elements in time, expect the premiere early 2015. Until then, time to finish up the last three pages of my short.

Every Headboard a Tombstone and Each Mattress a Coffin

I finally settled on some images I'm pretty happy with. Not sure how well they visualise temporal-spacial travel, but they look cool enough to live in and that's good enough for me. They sort of remind me of the digitisation sequence from Tron (1982).

Most of my recent efforts have gone towards plotting a new webcomic as a potential alternative to Ayiline. Thematically, it's pretty dark, so my main concern is trying to present it in a way that's accessible and funny. More on that when I get some concept images that don't totally suck.

Outer Frontiers of Human Conciousness

Today's project is a group time travel brief. We came up with a bizarre acid sci-fi epic inspired by the jazz musician Sun Ra. Turns out he actually made a blaxploitation film that's weirdly similar to our concept. Here's my pitch:

The lone survivor of an apocalyptic disaster on Saturn, Sun Ra constructs a device known as the Arkestra, a kind of futuristic chariot that operates like a musical instrument and allows for temporal-spatial travel, leaving the remnants of his vibrant Egyptian-like civilisation for the monochromatic bars and streets of Chicago's jazz scene. After witnessing the oppression on Earth and gaining a cult following for his mystic wisdom and musical prowess, he leads his newfound disciples back to Saturn to become the foundation of the utopian society he initially lost. This creates a stable time loop that brings us back to the beginning of the story, thousands of years later.

Obviously, I instantly appointed myself the group's narrative theorist, because I'm just that kind of guy, but I think it's an interesting foundation for some mad illustrationz, yo! I also kind of stumbled my way into glitch art and databending. Databending is the process of editing the code in an image to alter it visually. I thought it could be a pretty cool way of visualising temporal-spacial anomalies like time travel.

Below are some experiments. The first few are 2001: A Space Odyssey on acid. But, like, more than usual.

The next set are like Saturn rendered by a ZX Spectrum, loaded off a tape deck.

I dig it. It's kind of like printmaking. Every image you databend is unique, with its own imperfections and happy accidents. The fact that it's made digitally only makes it more special.

Monuments of Human Horror

Today I had a chance to look around Oxford and its wondrous museums. My favourite was The Pitts Rivers Museum, full of anthropological curiosities and morbid relics of times long past.

I'm not sure if I actually learned anything, but I tried my best to absorb as much collective imagery of observable human civilisation as I could. From what I've gathered, this mostly amounts to killing each other, mourning our loved ones and worshipping all manner of strange gods and monsters. This was an uneasy if obvious revelation, so afterwards I went and doodled animals.You know, animals we've killed and stuffed.

I don't know. Here is a picture of a frog with a hat:

Of Maiden Voyages and Apple Orchards

Success! I officially have permission to publish Ayiline as a webcomic. This calls for a cover page:

And here's a quick blurb to wrap things up:

"Coming off the heels of a family tragedy, Ayiline the smith's daughter must journey beyond the oppressive, sprawling forest encircling her house to find her estranged Gmo Crone. But there are other things that lurk beneath those wild branches, and not all of them mean her well..."

I can't wait to set sail on a new adventure with nothing but a Wacom stylus and my wits to aid me. Thankfully I should be finished inking my latest short by Christmas, so I don't have all that long to wait before starting afresh.

Beneath the Moaning Red Oak Boards

The late October air hangs heavy in the bedroom, already weary of the approaching dawn. Silence clings to every untouched surface, its hold unbroken save the frenzied clicking of an insomniac at work on his computer. The art student is awake.

He runs his fingers through his patchy beard, pondering what to type. Perhaps a joke to open with? He shakes his head, instead settling on a pretentious impression of his early morning ennui. "That'll let them know how sensitive I am", he says to himself in what he fancies himself a solemn manner. Then he decides to abandon the third person pretence because the joke is starting to become stale.

I finished the first sample page this morning.

 It's not exactly golden, but I only had two days so I guess it could be worse. If I can convince Michele to let me publish it as a webcomic, I'll be aiming for two updates a week, giving me about a day longer to produce each page. With no slip ups, the whole story should be finished in around 8 months. However, I really need to redraft the script again before beginning production, not to mention finishing inking my short and figuring out hosting options. At this point I'm beginning to get delirious from sleep deprivation so I think it's time to wrap this up. With any luck, I might just be able to squeeze out one more page before the hand in on Thursday.

Upon the Graves of Our Forefathers

Today I finished thumbnailing the comic. Final count: 73 pages. With under a week until the deadline, I am either going to have to make some sample pages and create the rest as a personal project, or invent some kind of temporal inhibitor device that allows me to continue working as time stops for the rest of the world. Right now I'm banking on the latter.

Here are the thumbs (apologies for the poor quality):

So I have a lot to do. Too bad I'm abandoning this project for tonight to work on my other comics. Hooray for poor time management!

Every Time the Phone Rings

So yesterday I went and got lost in the New Forest. I won't easily forget the stench of blood in the air that clung to my clothes like cold sweat, nor that haunting howl as night began to fall. The trees are like a cage when the sun starts to set.

Anyway, guess who took pictures!

I also  tried my unsteady hand at reportage drawing again, with disappointing results:

All in all, it was a fun trip. Would not recommend visiting on a full moon, however. In other news, I finally started working on adapting the script to thumbnails:

The script draft is only 18 pages, but comic books have the page conversion rate of dog years so the final count will probably be more like 60. Yeah, this is going to be a long haul, guys.