Happy new year

by on 26 January, 2010 at 10:53 pm
Posted In: musing

It is a new year, and I know I mentioned that I was going to work on the layout and script of story number 4, The Dessert while I was away on holiday over the Christmas and new year but things have really got the better of me and I’m only starting to work on writing a page summary and laying out the panels in my notebook just now. Some unanticipated events meant that a supposedly idle 3-4 weeks in the Far East turned into a rather strained and stressful time and working on this short story was furthest from my mind. Now it is a new year and I am left guiltily facing the fact that I have done nothing particularly creative whatsoever in the past few months (apart from two hurriedly drawn cartoon strips) and I have to buckle down to it now if I am to have any hope of finishing the ”book” by the end of this year. One major problem is creeping indiscipline, it is far too easy to let time simply slip through my fingers as there are 101 other distractions in my daily life.

Looking through my three other stories so far – it has been a learning process, and the first “Card Players” story was really an experiment with putting things together, dialogue and drawings, etc. and it was all done very quickly, within a fortnight, from beginning to end. The second, “Nighthawks” was not planned out at all beforehand, and left to meander its way into 16 pages. It could have done with more careful editing, but the end result is a stream-of-consciousness mess, although I don”t think it is entirely a failure. The last story, “The Snack Bar”, was wordless, and I seem to work easily with a stream of images – I planned all the panels within an hour and then, through many days of procrastination, laboured over finishing the pages of drawings, but it wasn’t a difficult attempt at all, oh no. I was preoccupied with at least a dozen other things at the time, and drawing the story just filled up the gaps of my day. Now that I have learned some valuable lessons from all these three stories, what will “The Dessert” be like? I will probably end up taking more time with the drawings themselves, adopting yet a different style (and I am still tempted to use a touch of colour for this one…. ala Seth) but will the story be interesting enough to hold the reader’s attention?

I don’t know when I will get the first page all done and scanned yet, but rest assured, some planning and writing is taking place right now.

New look website

by on 7 December, 2009 at 10:36 pm
Posted In: musing

Perhaps I’ve been procrastinating slightly on starting story number 4 but I’ve only really fleshed out the core of the story over the weekend, while lying awake in the early morning, unable to get back to sleep after being awoken by noise. So I’ll have to begin work on sketching the panels roughly and writing the dialogue over the next few days whenever I find the time, but there are many other pressing matters to attend to, not least because Christmas is fast approaching and my task list is growing.

Discovered a gem of a magazine over the weekend – The Believer, with a Chris Ware-lookalike cover and a special issue on art. They have a special comics section now too, it is a shame the subscription postage charges are so prohibitively expensive.

Anyway I think that some people have been bypassing my comic stories because the links to the stories themselves haven’t been too obvious. I’m also tired of a boring black background, having used one for my photography website for years. I think it’s time to brighten up the landscape. This egg yolk background is so irrepressibly summery and cheerful, in stark contrast to the stories themselves, so I think it works well, if only because it’s no longer black. I scrawled out a quick drawing with my pen tablet and Photoshop CS4, and learned a few more things about colour fills in PS. Anyway I hope this new website design will make it clearer to visitors that they have to actually click on the painting titles to access the stories.

I should mention here that I have got sort of an unpaid commission to do a comic strip for a university-based newsletter. No more details will be forthcoming on that. I may post a link to the comic strip sometime, but I’ve only done one so far and it remains to be seen whether I’ll do many more!

A long hiatus from drawing

by on 25 November, 2009 at 10:30 pm
Posted In: musing

It has been a long while since this blog was updated, my mind has been dwelling on other things. The task of finding an appropriate fourth painting to base a short story around has also proved a bit too problematic for a woefully preoccupied mind. But now I have a seed of an idea based around an unhappy marriage and the painting that seems to encapsulate the ennui and boredom of such a domestic arrangement is Pierre Bonnard’s picture of a couple sitting at the dinner table. They are sitting together, and yet are obviously apart. Since this will be a “talkie” once more, in a way it allows me to shamelessly procrastinate as I ponder on what the woman might be thinking or saying. It is also my first story with a female protagonist. I need to practise more in drawing the female form, which has never come to me as naturally as the male form. I had grown up reading comic books or picture books where most of the interesting and likeable characters were male and I probably absorbed my sense of physical proportions from those early comic books.

I did think my sojourn in the far NW of Scotland might give me some ideas, but a dental mishap had put an end to that. I have however, been collecting a few more graphic novels, notably Peter Kuper’s (excellent!) graphic interpretation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis and R.Crumb’s illustrated biography of Kafka. I find myself quite attracted to Kuper’s dark and slightly nostalgic style. And I also finally purchased Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library No 18 and read it all in one sitting – a depressing rumination on the solitary life of the unwanted, disabled female version of his anti-hero, Jimmy Corrigan. I have been putting off buying Tatsumi’s huge A Drifting Life; there is something about it that just doesn’t attract me although the story itself may be interesting. Tatsumi’s short stories never really resonated with me. That is all to report on the graphic novel-reading front. I’m not awaiting any other graphic novel apart from Craig Thompson’s Habibi.

The Dessert (or After Dinner) - Pierre Bonnard

Anyhow, here is the Bonnard painting that I am thinking of weaving my next story around. Doesn’t she look so awfully bored, like she wants to be somewhere else? And it is somewhat interesting to me that all the paintings I’ve chosen so far tend to revolve around eating — apart from the card players, who were drinking. Clearly suggesting a fascination with all things gastronomical.

Finished The Snack Bar Comic

by on 2 October, 2009 at 10:24 pm
Posted In: comics, drawing

At last the wordless comic is finished! It was certainly an enjoyable comic to draw, more so because I did not have the hassles of adding the text afterwards in Photoshop – post-scanning work is what I dread most about comic making, and I am not sure that using a Wacom Bamboo has made the process significantly more enjoyable (although clearing up scanning dust spots is now far easier). The comic was planned right from the very start and I made very rough sketches of each of the frames for all ten pages, so every time I started to pencil a new page, I used the sketches as a reference for what was going to happen in each panel. In this way I think I managed to pace the story quite tightly, far better than the rambling style of Nighthawks. Being free of text, I was also able to use jQuery and Thickbox to display each page in a somewhat slick manner, better than clicking on links in the older two stories. I would pencil in the page fairly quickly and then spend the next hour or so inking it, if I could still face doing any drawing in the same day. Sometimes I could only muster two pages a week.

So now, I have to think of a new painting to focus my fourth story on, and to work out the plot. I’ll be in Scotland for a break so here’s hoping for a few flashes of inspiration.