With all this in my head, and a deadline looming, I did what any sane rational person would do. Nothing. I thought about drawing, I questioned how I could do this in 3 days. 3 DAYS.

I thought.

And I thought some more.

Nothing. Zip. Zilch.

So like most students I did an all nighter.

 

How good was that long, drawn out introduction, eh?

I took my tutors advice and started using different media. However I did it two pages at a time. The rotation worked as pen and ink, paint, pens, pastels and then back to pen and ink.

 

     

 

Within the story of the comic, the media changes actually helps to compliment the story, and it adds some variety.

 

So overall, this project has been alright. It didn’t end exactly how I planned, but I am still happy with the result.

I had another Tutorial after finishing two of the new pages (the shaded ones). After it, I started to question what the point of the comic was. The Comic as a whole, but also my art style.

My biggest fear had been laid out in front of me in horrific, gory detail. The “S” word. No, not shit, but Steadman. One of my biggest influences.

Which is the problem.

That tutorial made me realise that as individual as we all love our art to be, there is no such thing. Our pretty pictures are nothing more than influences, at least for me. Aspects like faces in some cases have been a developing style for me over the past 2 years, but overall the tone of my images and Steadman’s are too similar for my liking.

Some advice I got at the Tutorial was to use the time I had left to draw the comic, but with different media that I am not used to, to break out of this Steadmanesque motif I seem to be stuck in.

 

 

 

With the story boards underway I started drawing the actual comic. This started well enough, however after an initial tutorial, I was told to rework aspects of the story, getting to point B from A was too fast. I needed to build up the character more and make him more empathetic. Give him some feeling.

 

 

Two pages from the dummy book, which was made to give a clearer outline of the story.

 

 

 

 

 

I started to experiment with the pages and not just use fine line work, but I didn’t really like how it turned out, it didn’t look as neat as I had envisioned. All though perfectionism is a slippery slope, I do think that the artist should try to still aim high. You know if your happy with a piece of work when you look at it, and this comic was not going in that direction.

 

 

 

Finally, I started over again, only this time I used ink and pen and tried to be more relaxed about the whole project. The ink was water soluble, which then meant I could run a wet brush over the drawings and add shading. I liked it.

 

 

Remember that post about the unnamed comic? Well I decided to do that as my final project, mainly to give me more of a motive and push to finish it.

I started with sketching the character in different positions, figuring out how he would look and how to make it all proportionate.

Next came the writing aspect, fleshing out the main character, and the intro to the story. Someone waking up, realising it is another monotonous day, and trying to get on with it anyway.

 

After writing the story, I started to draw the sketched storyboards, overall it went up to 70+ pages. The idea of drawing the comic was slowly becoming less and less appealing due to the time frame I had to do it in, and the amount of work that I would need to do. I was slowly digging my own grave.

 

 

  

 

 

For the semiotics brief, I chose option 3, which had to do with jargon and hidden meaning. I wanted to focus this mainly on politics, partially because of the example given in the brief, but also because political cartoons are something I would like to do.

 

 

 

I started to some sketches and practice cartoons of what I was going to draw, initially the idea was to take quotes from politicians and then what they were actually thinking, in the case of the image below, it is Theresa May on the site of Grenfell, a rather embarrassing example of May trying to reach out to “the people”, that was swiftly swept under the political faux pas rug.

 

Eventually I came up with some ideas and put it into plans, the order of the cartoons, and the content of them too.

 

With what I wanted to do sort of taking shape, I began drawing the cartoons. Using pen for some, and ink and pen for others.

After scanning in and then laying out images on in-design, the final book was printed. Overall I think that I need to get better at the Photoshop/in-design, I am now at a point where I can use it alright, I think I need to figure out more of it how it works more.

 

 

 

 

For the second part of the remain in light project, I wanted to create a small stop motion animation of a character lighting and a cigerette and then sneezing. I didn’t finish this because I wasn’t sure how to go about doing the animation part due to how the figures were set up.

 

If I could do it again I probably would have filmed the characters instead of taking photos.

     

 

Edits from the first part of the remain in light project.

I found a brush ink pen in the studio and started to experiment with it, pressing down on the brush gives more ink so in the image some faces look more defined than others.

 

 

 

 

 

After that I came home and did the same image but used acrylic paint instead, mainly dry brush which gives a weird ghost like quality to the drawing.

Boo.

Working on a comic at the moment as a running side project, not sure how long it is gonna take, but I am excited about the story possibilities, the premise is about the butterfly effect and in it a different universe is created depending on the choices someone makes. This means that there are two stories going on at the same time, which will be similar, however I am worried it might be too confusing.