Close to Death, Closer to Tears

We interrupt your scheduled programming to announce a new brief: an editorial illustration. Stop what you're doing and produce a visual response to this article!

Okay, I may have misread the deadline as two days later than reality, so expect things to be a little rushed. My impression of the article was that it was trying to argue drawing is a necessary tool to comprehend and respond to the external world. I wanted to try and convey the idea of drawing as an enlightening practice in the image I created, and I settled on the design of a pencil as a motif for exploring this concept.

After experimenting with a graphite stick and pencil, I settled on ink as a medium, though I opted to draw with a blunt instrument instead of a brush to make the line more raw. I was inspired by the landscapes of Escher, Noble and Supermundane, who to me all seem to depict the relationship with the artist to the outside world. With this in mind I set out to create some complete sketches.

This is the first image I completed, and I'm really happy with it, but it doesn't fit with the dimensions I had to used and I never got around to adding colour.

This is another concept I had that seemed pretty cool, but the execution is really lackluster. I think it could have worked if it were much cleaner and more intricate. Again, it doesn't really work with the portrait orientation, so I moved on to another concept.

This is the first attempt of my final image. The hands are kind of cool, but the composition is all wrong. I moved on pretty quickly from this.

This is my second attempt. The hands look really interesting in this one, kind of a Quentin Blake aesthetic. I actually like it more than the final image, but it still feels pretty sparse so I decided to give it one more try.

This is the final version. I thought about adding colour, but I decided monochrome would be a better when viewed against black text and a white backdrop. I don't know. I'm not really pleased with this, but editoral work is always really short notice so I guess it's something you have to be ready for. I just wish I could have made that centre glow less digital; I had to edit the scan to make it appear correctly because there was a shadow over it from the paper going crinkly. 

If I could go over and redo it, I'd explore my other concepts more, because I think there's a lot of missed potential in them. I guess sometimes you have to stab yourself repeatedly in the chest to churn out something for the deadline.

An Academic Glimpses Infinity

Today's project is postmodernism. I'm to promote or discuss the subject in zine format to be released at an undisclosed point in March.

Postmodernism is a broad cultural movement ranging from philosophy to architecture, beginning in the 20th century and arguably continuing to this day. Having only approached it from a literary standpoint, I don't have the best understanding of the label as an artistic genre, but like modernism it's mainly defined by its focus on the subjectivity of  conceptual relativism and its rejection of traditional artistic values, such as the distinction between high and low art. Where it differs from modernism is in its approach; while modernism is nihilistic in its portrayal of the world as a fragmented mess of subjective impressions, postmodernism instead celebrates this freedom.This is why pop art, minimalism and abstract expressionism can be considered both modern and postmodern in their approach to art. In general, something can be considered postmodern if it makes use of irony, deconstruction or metafictional themes.

After some initial research and letting the ideas build in my head for awhile, I started on visuals.

This is a response to the expressionist movement, a satirical pastiche of Magritte's The Son of Man. The lampshade is a metatextual icon, representing the convention of explicitly referencing the artistic constructs that make up an artform within the art itself. This is known colloquially as lampshade hanging, in which the offending trope is drawn attention in a way that paradoxically diminishes its artificial qualities. The idea is that this modernist icon has been appropriated as a demonstration of the fictional nature of art.

Still just experimenting, I tried my hand at pixel art. It's actually just a base image manipulated by hand to be more low res, but it's something I've never done so I guess it's not bad for a start. Digital art is considered postmodern, so I thought about making the zine as a blog of some kind, with content that exclusively comments on modern life through a digital lens.

This is an attempt at minimalism. I don't think it really works. The gradient is the wrong colour and I think the size doesn't work, but it's something I could come back to.

Continuing with the lampshade motif, I started to think about the role of the frame in art. Incorporating it into the image itself seems to proclaim that the presentation of an image is just as important as the image itself, and that when removed of the context of presentation it ultimately becomes meaningless. By now I'm stacking lampshades on lampshades.

I made an animated gif from the image to try and approach things from a digital-exclusive manner. I think it's about questioning the boundaries between art and reality, or alternatively nothing at all.

This is the inspiration for the painting gif. I created it at around the same time and saw a connection to the project, so I redid it with the postmodern iconography I'd developed.

That's about all I've come up with for now. I also considered randomly arranging website favicons to spell out cryptic and esoteric things. Maybe it could be a comment on how technology shapes modern life?

I don't know. I need to go to bed.

With Hearts Diseased as These

Finally finished my short, just in time for the new year. So glad to be free of it. Now I can focus on a̶l̶l̶ ̶m̶y̶ ̶o̶v̶e̶r̶d̶u̶e̶ ̶a̶s̶s̶i̶g̶n̶m̶e̶n̶t̶s̶  other comics that will in no way improve my grade. In seriousness, I'm pretty pleased with it. The dialogue is a little contrived and there are panels I'm not fond of, but I feel like I pushed myself to say something about myself I have trouble putting together in words. It's kind of like therapy, or an exorcism. Maybe now the voices will stop too.

You can read it here.

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.