#my evolving process

Aside from the extended preparation work, my process is typically the same: I start with a warm-up doodle, and in thumbnails, the art comes first, then the bubbles, then the finalized words. When I start the project, I have a vague idea of where I want to the story to go. Then, I plot out what I want the panels to be; how big they are, how many of them, and what goes in each one. It helps me set the pace for my story. I found that, in creating the layout for my final comic, I relied heavily on a manga series I was catching up on instead of the comics we’d been reading in class. I found myself more inspired by the storytelling strategy from the Japanese manga than the comics we’ve read. This could be partly because, instead of reading American comics as a kid, I was always nose-deep into different volumes of manga. As a result, the storytelling and panel layout techniques feel more familiar to me, so adopting them into my own strategies feels less forced.

I want to experiment with color, and as I finish my Adaptation Project I fully intend to do so. I don’t know what medium I’ll end up using—most likely colored pencils—but I’m excited to experiment with coloring and shading. I felt really inspired after our Hawkeye reading, seeing how the colorist colored the entire manuscript at once instead of page by page.

My comic creation process involves a lot more brainstorming. Not on paper, either: entirely in my mind. For me, I have to visualize the kind of image I want to create, and then just try to draw that from what’s in my head. It’s tough, since I don’t have the artistic skill to perfectly replicate what I imagine. However, I assume that skill will only grow with time. The art and text boxes have come first, so far, and the words second. I assume it’ll continue this way, but it’s hard to tell.

So far this semester, I’ve been drawing in stick figures. For my final project however, I have decided to actually put more effort into my art. I have been practicing drawing cats and, while they are nowhere near perfect, they actually don’t look that bad. I’m also trying to do more with the panels. Instead of just four panels to a page, I’m trying to change it up a little. There’s nothing wrong with the four panel layout, but it does get boring after a while, and it can be restricting with how much it allows me to include per page.

I started with the text because I knew from past experiences that if I didn’t put the text first, it would throw everything else out of proportion. I drew my panels and then added the words at the top, drawing a line so it would be separate from the image. That wasn’t the hardest part, though. I tend to draw really small pictures, but I tried to make the boxes bigger so they took up more of the page. The hard part was getting the size of my drawings to match the size of the boxes. I think it turned out well enough. It took me about an hour, I would say, to do the adaptation. Most of that was spent redoing the project because it took me two tries to actually settle on a topic to draw. Once I had chosen the nursery I wanted to do, it took me three more tries before I was actually ready to turn it in, and even then I still wasn’t entirely okay with how it turned out.

I spent more time on my adaptation project than I did on any of the other comic assignments we were given. I redrew it three different times. And even then I still wasn’t completely satisfied with how it turned out, but I had run out of time to complete it. I have learned that I need to give myself more time to do these, even if they aren’t worth much grade wise. If I want to improve my skills as a comic creator, I need to give myself the time to do so. My style of planning and actually creating the comic didn’t change though. I still used a pencil and my sketchbook, I just put a little more time into the thought process. I had originally planned to do Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, but when I sat down to draw it, I realized I didn’t know how to draw it out so that I could make the page count. I hadn’t planned on doing the whole rhyme, but, again, when I went to adapt it, I realized that it might not make sense to only draw part of it or, even worse, try to mesh together different parts of the rhyme so that it would take up more than one page. The other problem I ran into was that there were a lot of words to write down and they took up a lot of space. I tried a few different nursery rhymes after that, and Mondays Child seemed the best fit. It was short, it could easily be turned into a 2 page comic, and I could see a reasonable argument for doing so.

When I first started the comic assignments, I thought I’d be using pens. I even went out and got the pens Professor Holic recommended. I haven’t used them once (to be honest, I think I lost it). I prefer pencil because I can erase something if I mess it up. I thought about using them to outline everything once I was done, but then I remembered that not only can I not draw, I can’t trace either. I was afraid I would mess up my artwork (not that it could get any worse), so I just left it alone. For the drawings, it usually only took me no more than a half hour, from the conception of the idea I wanted to draw to the final draft of the artwork. The photo comic was a pain, however. I spent over an hour putting it together. For my hand drawn comics, I start with the artwork, and then fit the text in later. If I did it the other way around, it wouldn’t work. Spacing is something I struggle with, which I knew going into this, but that knowledge was only solidified when I started working on my comics. I prefer to write, rather than to draw because I can’t do the latter, only the former. In spite of this, I have found that my drawing process is not so different from my writing process. I spend some time on the idea before attempting it, but mostly I just start and see what happens, adjusting things along the way.