3000 Comic Strip, The Work load.
I have dug deep in to my harddrive in retrieving the very first illustrstions done around 10 years ago.
In Touch With Rawness
These where done at a time when I only knew a little Photoshop, with no plans what so ever in how or what to make of these, and like most teenage projects : I did a handful of these illustrations until I grew bored and kinda ran out of ideas. BUT, thinking back these were done around the time when I started getting depressed and I think the crazy, outlandish teenage emo. me really came through in these decade old drawings.
Ive would always remember these drawings though, despite the fact that they were rough and lacked a proper know-how BUT I think they held an energy, the sort of energy that could only be done when going through a mental breakdown as a struggling teenager. As I gotten older, that raw expressiveness is lost, thats why I think in developing my new comic art it is super important to revisit these in order to get back in touch with that energy.
Reflecting On An Epic Failure
There was an ambitious attempt during my top-up degree in completing a WHOLE issue, a whopping 30 pages 5-7 panels each! Although it came out looking like crap, a valuable lesson was learnt back then: ALOT of time is needed. I think I remembered having stayed up like 2 days in a row having realised that my time was almost up, and that it did not come out as I intended it to be.
Reflecting on this piece of failure made me wiser though: I will chop my story up and only draw 15-20 panels tops per issue and that experimentation of how the panels would come out looking like BEFORE I dig-in is also super important.
Getting Better All The Time With Attempts
Ive always loved to draw and during my brief time in an animation course, the 2 life drawings classes did improve my drawing techniques by ALOT, but that was like 8 years ago.
It took a while to have that touch with the pencil kick back in, page after page of attempts were done and finally some of these figures start to make my standard. I then came to a realization: Countless comic artists sit at their desk on Youtube videos and on their drawing board is this ever polished drawing, the footage of that made the cut, but behind the camera how many attempts have they made? Even master artists like Alex Ross and Todd Mcfarlane might have quite a pile of sketches and layouts that end up in the trash…so who am I to not go nuts and just make attempt after attempt? That’s exactly what I did.
Extra Advice
As my drawing started to look a bit better from just drawing around 2 hours a day, Richard provided me with some splendid advice in looking into comic panels vs film camera angles and techniques + to have a look at Matt Madden’s 99 ways to tell a story.
Then I had to go back to mom’s to dig in to my comic book collection…
The Mask Strikes Back by Titan Books is such a GREAT comic, I own bigger well-known titles like Maximum Carnage (Marvel), Zero Hour (DC), Deadpool : Killustrated (Marvel) etc., but nothing beats the framing, inking and writing of The Mask Strikes Back. Just on the 2 pages above there’s : worms eye view, extreme close-ups, two shots and crowd shots AND comic techniques like flow of read and continuity. The success of utilizing all these techniques has allowed this story to jump from realistic to cartoon, dramatizing all that is happening in a fun to read, engaging piece of pop-art!
Armed with a more polished drawing hand and having took a deep dive in to my comic collection in identify what makes some comics great and other’s not as much… I decided to go back and re-frame and redo everything I have so far.
ANDY WAS HERE
ANDY was here 🤓 