#fst asks

Thank you for taking the time to say kind things about my work. It makes me very emotional to hear.

Oh man, thank you! That’s super kind. I hope some of my advice will be useful to you. I learned a lot and changed how I think about backgrounds during my work on F-ST, and much of the following I’m still trying to apply.

Backgrounds can be an important part of layout and visual storytelling decisions. Think of them as another tool to use to manipulate mood and create meaning alongside the characters and dialogue. Design them with intention. Perspective grids and rulers are your friends.

A very dated book on layout I found at a junk store contained this gem of advice to designers for choosing whether a photograph or a drawing would be better for their layout:

“A great artist once said that drawing means leaving out, and this is an essential truth about advertising art too. … [Drawings] exaggerate and omit. They must…make a direct appeal to the feelings, while the photograph mercilessly presents to the eye all the small flaws and shortcomings that are impossible to eliminate entirely. Drawings appeal to the imagination; photographs convey facts.”

Backgrounds can FEEL realistic even if they are rendered very simply, or stylistically. Designing backgrounds and compositions for realistic feeling can be done myriad ways, but the context of this question is F-ST and in that comic I took a cinematic approach. So compositionally, I used principles/techniques in storyboard layout for film when constructing scenes and “shooting” them. Stylistically, I learned to push toward simple, readable shapes, peppered with world-building “personality” details.  If a scene needs to feel OPPRESSIVE, the angle of the objects in it, the lighting, the framing, the contrast of scale, etc. can all be used to add realism to the FEELING of oppression, even if your style doesn’t render “realistically.”

If it helps, I broke down background composition for the designers at my day job into these topics:

1. Thinking in Shapes2. Focal Points (designating visual hierarchy)3. Framing4. Foreground, Midground, & Background (creating depth and directing the eye with values)5. Mood Manipulation6. Rendering

There’s a lot to say about each topic and I’d recommend researching them further if you’re interested! “Framed Ink” by Marcos Mateu-Mestre is a solid book on composing shots and backgrounds for storyboarding that I’ve drawn much from. Generally, approach any of this study asking “WHY” shots are framed a certain way, or lit a certain way; “WHY” characters are staged as they are, “WHY” the background is blurred (or more likely in comics, entirely omitted) or in full detail. The answers might prove useful and help you creatively solve the problem for your own narrative use.

in “Framed Ink,” Mateu-Mestre writes this:

“Obviously we aim to produce to best quality art, but we should prioritize the following:

1. What are we trying to say in our narration as a whole?2. What mood do we want our audience to be in throughout the story and at any given time within a specific sequence or shot?3. What is the function of this moment within the story?4. How are we going to take our audience there?5. What in our drawing is contributing to the general statement?
What can we leave out without changing what we are trying to say?”

I like asking myself those questions when deciding where a scene should be set and how to frame the beats within that scene, etc.

I linked some resources and blabbed more about some aspects of this in this past ask.

As a final note, I’ll say that part of my decision to set F-ST where and when I set it is because I took no pleasure drawing clean lines and environments (like in my other comic, Water). It’s hard for me. I’m not saying to not push yourself or grow, but that by working within your limitations you can often exceed them. Wobbly lines help work with run-down and messy locations as opposed to working against them. Plus I love coming up with fake band names and that sort of stuff, so I designed a setting where the things I ENJOYED in backgrounds could help add realism and meaning to the story.

I’m always down to chat more about this. And if you’d like a powerpoint of that workshop, e-mail me. It’s got exercises, haha.

You’re not wrong, haha. I give him a 1% chance of not having been absolutely terrible

Oh man, that’s a fun one but a tough one!

Extratextual stuff isn’t really my jam. I love and respect the magic of how something I write takes on a completely different, vibrant life in the mind of readers – and I really think that the more I give y’all outside of the text, the more I’m attempting asserting control over that magic in a way that really just lessens it for both of us.

I’ve been writing towards an ending the whole time, and if an idea doesn’t further the story in a meaningful way, it gets discarded (or Frankensteined into something meaningful, as y’all saw with the Damien-mocking-French-scene ). This might be my only point of confidence about writing: the discard pile doesn’t haunt me. There’s also nothing stopping me from extending my self-imosed page count to accommodate anything that I feel will help the story. If anything, I’m having more trouble reckoning with the things I included earlier on that I no longer think add anything, haha.

I love editing and although the idea of editing F-ST exhausts the living crap outta me, I’m very excited to polish this thing and make it better once it’s done and I can finally step back and see its shape. Regret is generally a vice I try to be mindful not to engage with — but I’ve never finished anything of this scope before, so there’s always a chance I’ll get bitten in the ass by this confidence, haha.

The more off-topic Ask doodles are the closest things I can think to extratextual tangents of characterization or exposition! I’m picky about what and how I answer — and the more extratextual answers I chose to draw are for, like, brainstorming purposes, honestly.

That all being said, the story isn’t over yet, and I’m still waffling about the last five pages. I have en epilogue of sorts in mind, but I can’t tell yet if it’s just a self-indulgent bit of characterization because I can’t let go, or if the addition will actually add anything meaningful at the end. So, uh, we’ll see what happens, haha.

My 20-pages-to-the-end compromise is that if I really think it’s necessary after finishing and editing the thing, I’ll draw it for the final print version. At 10-pages-to-the-end, more of the story will be in focus and I’ll likely have a more firm answer on whether or not it’s necessary.