Artemis Draws

It has been a relatively unproductive week. After inking my third page of the Nighthawks, I decided to revamp the dialogue completely and turn it into a letter format, i.e the narrator is writing a letter to his sister Sally. It resolves several problems I had with the unravelling of the plot towards the end, and I have persuaded myself that this is the way to go. I’m still not too satisfied with the rather casual style of drawing and inking I’ve employed  here though. Perhaps this is my most natural style – as opposed to the Card Players – and I’ve never particularly enjoyed drawing backgrounds, and stark, flourescent-lit diner backgrounds are especially difficult to conjure up in one’s mind, especially in an era which one has not personally experienced. Perhaps my next story should be set in a later time period, something more contemporary and familiar. At any rate, I am struggling to finish this story within ten pages, this one might drag closer to twenty, and most of the scenes will be banal diner ones. I hope it will still hold a reader’s attention though…. I have been taking a break from working on this comic, reading Proust – Vol IV and thinking about re-designing the ArtemisDraws website with a bit of Javascript. And I’m up to my 4th page of Nighthawks, and still rewriting the script as I go along.

This is the second painting which I am weaving a story around. It is quite a predictable choice – Hopper’s paintings, in general, are predictable choices because of their intriguing cast of characters often give rise to the inevitable questions of who and why. I also thought that a rather cliched choice would also make the scene more instantly recognisable, which is one of my primary intentions in making this series of short story comics. So many questions remain; what style to use, whether to use limited colour or to stick to my usual sombre monochromatic palette, and so on. I’m currently scripting the story and it will be longer than the previous Card Players, although I want to draw the line at twenty pages. I do not want it to drag on into one of those interminable projects which I’ll tire of before finishing. The burning question is, can I hold the viewer’s interest for twenty pages if most of the action goes on in the protagonist’s head? The trouble with the sort of comics I like making is that I am more interested in interiority than in external action.

Nighthawks - Edward Hopper

I started sketching out the first page today and inked two of the panels. Sadly, the heat and eyestrain are both conniving to make me abandon this work for the next few days, I do not feel very inspired anyway and just feel very lethargic.

Wikipedia has provided some useful basic information. Edward Hopper’s diner, now demolished, once stood in a place now called Mulry Square, at the intersection of 7th Ave S, Greenwich Ave and West 11th St in New York City. It is easy to take a virtual trip there using Google Streetview, and the sad, vacant lot is presumably where the diner once stood