With the constant work of making the studios exhibition ready, finishing my work and setting up my exhibition space I've realised that I completely forgot to blog about printing out my two books for said exhibition.
The first I printed out was 'Absolution' my comic book. This one was relatively it is only 44 pages so I did a standard saddle-stitch binding that the printer can do automatically. I printed it on paper bigger than the book size, because bleed and then cut it down and the book was done. I actually had to add in pages to give myself a number divisible by 4 that is needed to print a book this way. Also the first one I printed I noticed a lot of my blacks weren't that black so I had to alter the files and reprint it.
My style art book, titled 'Drawing Style' was more complicated. For one thing there were 80 pages, this meant it was too thick to saddle stitch so I would have to perfect bind it. I was told this could be done using a strip at the side or with a wraparound cover. The cover way seemed nicer so I chose that way. This meant I had to print out the inside pages first, measure how thick they were together (on silk coated paper) and add that to the cover size so it could wrap around all of the book. Like before I had to print all the pages on bigger paper, (because bleed) this meant A4 in this case and then cut them down. I then got a binding strip and used a perfect binding machine to glue the inside pages together, then later do the same with the inside and the cover/back cover page. I'm really pleased with how both books turned out, they are different but think they both work best for what they are, a comic book and a what is essentially a fashion catalogue that is purely illustrated.
Uni Illustration
Friday, 20 May 2016



The last pieces I put up were the A8 series of work I had made. I put them along the bottom of all my space with a large spacing between each of the 14 images to try and bring all these separate series of my works together. On the shelf bellow my work are my two books. Hopefully this is only temporary though as I plan to put a shelf/ledge in to hold them. This would hopefully bring more gravitas to my books, especially my comic which may otherwise be overlooked or overwhelmed by my other works.
Saturday, 14 May 2016
Silence and east meets west
When the direction of my comic changed from a more typical comic to more of a montage of large landscapes with suggestions of what is going on I though about a quote from 'Understanding Comics' by Scott McCloud. I don't have the book with me but the gist is that in Japan and Eastern cultures art is is about what isn't there as much as it is about what is. This comes from Scott McCloud talking about the amount of aspect to aspect transitions in manga compared to western comics. These are panels used to establish mood and sense of place, they are usually quiet and contemplative. McCloud puts this down to Eastern cultures having an emphasis over being there rather than getting there while Western art doesn't like to wander and is more goal orientated so lingers less and is less committed to scenes that purely create atmosphere.
This is interesting in the context of my comic since moving to doing a montage story. I'm actually skipping over a lot of the action, showing the prelude and aftermath only to most events. My images have a lot of emptiness about them and are trying to create an atmosphere, they emphasise being there. At the same time changing to a montage of images for the entire narrative leads to the story being told a lot quicker, kind of goal orientated. My comic is a nice mash up of eastern and western values.
My comic is more east meets west than just that though. As much as my comic is ultimately a western it is also riddled with samurai film nods. This makes sense as most Westerns are effectively Samurai films set in the wild west instead of Japan and with guns instead of swords. I have referenced this via some clothing codes of certain characters, some settings and one character at the end becomes an eastern style monk. This also worked out well as Samurai films generally take place in green hilly mountainous landscapes not completely unlike those of Scotland that I've been being influenced by. I looked mainly at Akira Kurosawa films to inform me during the later stages of this project.
Because of how Western films are strongly influence by Samurai films they actually already had a lot of silence and emptiness to create a sense of atmosphere more so than most western media. This meant that the way my comic had been going before this change to montage and eastern influence was already perfectly situated for this change and makes the changes happening to the project and narrative now, pretty natural.
I'm going to talk more about my eastern influences in this project a bit more in later posts.
Sources
http://cdn.collider.com/wp-content/uploads/seven_samurai_movie_image_01.jpg
http://blog.ricecracker.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/Picture-11.png
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/4LcVQJ4IBtM/maxresdefault.jpg
This is interesting in the context of my comic since moving to doing a montage story. I'm actually skipping over a lot of the action, showing the prelude and aftermath only to most events. My images have a lot of emptiness about them and are trying to create an atmosphere, they emphasise being there. At the same time changing to a montage of images for the entire narrative leads to the story being told a lot quicker, kind of goal orientated. My comic is a nice mash up of eastern and western values.

Because of how Western films are strongly influence by Samurai films they actually already had a lot of silence and emptiness to create a sense of atmosphere more so than most western media. This meant that the way my comic had been going before this change to montage and eastern influence was already perfectly situated for this change and makes the changes happening to the project and narrative now, pretty natural.
I'm going to talk more about my eastern influences in this project a bit more in later posts.
Sources
http://cdn.collider.com/wp-content/uploads/seven_samurai_movie_image_01.jpg
http://blog.ricecracker.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/Picture-11.png
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/4LcVQJ4IBtM/maxresdefault.jpg
Sunday, 8 May 2016
Every Frame a Painting
One resource I've used this project for my narrative work is the youtube channel every frame a painting. This channel analyses certain elements in film in depth in ways you wouldn't usually think of, looking at the composition of individual frames and what the positioning and such of certain elements means. He also looks at the changes in scenes and shots and looks at why these changes are made and what they're used for. Obviously as the channel is looking at films not everything is relevant to my project, such as anything involving sound, or camera movement. Things to do with screen composition, mise-en-scene, iconography, colour, lighting etc are all appropriate to being transferred to a single illustration. Even editing and certain change of shots can be used when dealing with series of images. Also looking at film resources helps give my narrative a cinematic feel that I'm going for.
Dimitar Marinski


I'll do a bigger post about these photos and work next.
Sources
https://cdn2.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/001/308/214/large/dimitar-marinski-onemore.jpg?1444080864
https://cdn3.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/001/286/675/large/dimitar-marinski-thewall.jpg?1443649349
The Dark Tower
A big influence for my western comic project was the book series The Dark Tower by Stephen King. The book is a sort of post apocalyptic western with sci-fi elements as well as things going on in the real world. I was most interested in the western elements and the post apocalyptic elements and decide to start storyboarding it. This was partly down to me having very clear imagery in my head of what the beginning scenes would look like.
Eventually I took the setting and applied it to my own story and that's where the bulk of my current comic project has come from. Also drawing the initial scenes for the opening of the storyboard made me really like drawing single cinematic style scenes, well composed and a little bit epic. These sorts of scenes are what my comic evolved into interestingly enough making it more like a storyboard than a comic by the end of the project.

Eventually I took the setting and applied it to my own story and that's where the bulk of my current comic project has come from. Also drawing the initial scenes for the opening of the storyboard made me really like drawing single cinematic style scenes, well composed and a little bit epic. These sorts of scenes are what my comic evolved into interestingly enough making it more like a storyboard than a comic by the end of the project.

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