Western comic

The comic side of my project has been neglected a bit on this blog mainly due to it being a background thing. Something I work on during lapses in my style project. 

I've been doing a western style genre for my comics story. I chose a western because I find western films and such very visually interesting. Think any Classic Clint Eastwood film. A problem with this approach however is being constricted by the classic setting and iconography of the western as well as trying to remain at least somewhat accurate to the time period/genre. I've come up with two approaches to combat this. The first was to soak in as much western genre media as possible, films, tv, comics etc. The second is that I'll give the western genre of my comic a twist, I'll set it in a sort of fictional world, so that I'm not tied down in what I want to draw or let the world be,it'll still predominantly be western though. 

This is similar to the first two western comics I can think of, East of West by Hickman and illustrated by Dragotta and the Dark Tower comic series adapted from the Stephen Kings books of the same name. Both of these take place in a sort of alternative future, semi apocalyptic earth and are more heavily influenced in terms of western elements than westerns themselves. Makes sense as the western did get a bit stale and boring after the 70s. 

The last two days I have attended a book making workshop. A lot of it was about different ways of approaching  making unique style artist books that open in weird ways and have bits that pop up etc. I tried making pop up bits because it looked rather simple. This lead to me drawing my normal style drawings over bits of paper that would be cut up and raised. This lead to my normal drawings but in a context where they could be altered to appear strange and distorted. This had a really cool visual that I definitely want to explore further. Also work in the context of a book is just really cool. The fiddly precise nature of making a book does not play to my strengths however so I embraced a rough, mismatched look that I believe I could support with my style. This could develop to create a really strong sense of aesthetic.

I also learned Japanese book binding. This was fiddly, tricky and confusing at the time but in hindsight I quite liked it. I really like the boom I made and although I made mistakes with the stitching and did some things in the wrong order it still holds together and I want to explore this method more. It seems like a good option for a one off artist book that doesn't need multiple copies. I think the aesthetic could be tinkered with to mirror the images I'd put inside to make a book, like my other one I made, it's good to have options.

Style

Here are some examples of work I've tried to make that achieve something photography couldn't. As I've said earlier when illustration is used in place of photography in a situation where photography could be used (so most of my work which comes from photos) it shoul present some sort of attitude or feeling. I've played around with this by experimenting with backgrounds and different maybe more expressive marks.

Studio space 19/11/2015

Comic work

Here's just an overview of some of my comic work showing how I've been creating the pages and using photoshop to clean the pages and colour them. I don't know much about photoshop but you knowledge is progressing as I go. As I learn how to use photoshop it is influencing how I go about doing my physical work, realising what I need to do in the physical form and what is better left to photoshop. This also helps with figuring out how to deal with mistakes.

Studio throughout the project so far 26/10 to beginning

I haven't talked about the narrative side of the project so I'll do it now. I'm working on a comic because I think that worked well last year. I'm going for a similar style as well drawing with ink in a loose-ish  style with a brush. This sort of working isn't very typical in comics which usually have a more solid, defined style. This typical style doesn't really suit my strengths however so I'm trying to create my own ways of doing things. I think the style works quite well (although obviously a bit of tuning is needed) and gives my comic so far a distinct look.
I don't think the lack of a normal comic-ish style is too important as comics today are becoming more and more varied in style anyway, especially with the rise of indie and creator owned comics like those published by Image comics. These comics such as Low, Deadly Class and Paper Girls are my main influences when it comes to comics and those with a more typical style, such as the majority of Marvel and DC's material I find to be rather boring and often just plain bad looking. Of course their are exceptions and even Marvel and DC are starting to vary their styles slightly like with the newest Hawkeye and Batgirl  series for instance.
Most comics are still a lot closer to the typical comic style than mine however.

I was looking at some fashion illustration books in the library while thinking about what Allison said to me about the difference between what an illustration and photo can do. I looked through several books showing illustrations that have appeared in vogue, paying special attention to any illustrations that appear in issues after photography was becoming the norm. I came to the conclusion that due to being able to stylise drawings more than photos (especially in the early days of photography) means that illustrations were used less to give an accurate representation of what clothing looked like and are more about presenting an attitude, lifestyle or idea. The complete freedom of illustration (as compared to photography, especially back then) allows certain amounts of abstraction, stylisation and freedom of background to suggest more abstract concepts or attitudes that the magazine wants to convey.
Another reason why Vogue specifically used to include so much illustration in there magazine and had a tradition of illustrated covers for a while even after photography became a valid option is initially Vogue wanted to present fashion more as an art than anything else, to bring a sense of sophistication or class to itself and the merchandise it was presenting. Illustration more easily provoked these ideas in people than photos.

I had a conversation  with Alison about my work. At the time my work was very aimless and more for its own sake then anything else. This was pretty much Alison's view as well, the work I was doing was good but it didn't really have a point.
The majority of my work was being drawn from fashion magazines and one of Alison's main issues with my work was that it doesn't do anything that photos couldn't do instead. I see what she means but I disagree. Simply put I think my drawings look better than photos. Obviously this excuse is kind of lame, Alison was not pleased with it. Essentially it comes down to anyone can take a photo and given a similar subject every photo will look relatively the same. Photography is so ubiquitous these days that it almost has no effect anymore beyond just recording an image.
Drawing and illustration however are more reflective of the person creating the image and will constantly look different every time. Especially when you play around with style and materials. These are aspects of my work which will develop with the more I make and create more of a gap between my work and photography. I spoke to Gill and she pretty much agrees with me and says I just need to keep making work and my issues will iron themselves out.

Fashion magazines

I meant to post this a while back but kept forgetting to get photos. Something that has been a great help for the style side of my project is realising what a great resource fashion magazines can be. They are full of high quality photos of a range of clothes and hairstyles but more than that the many of the photos, like my drawings seem to be very about the person as well, using poses and facial expression getting across an attitude and personality. The main issue is there's a lot of styles that I don't care about are included and there actually very few clothing/hair styles that i like (kind of alternative, androgynous look), I guess it will broaden my horizons when it comes to working in this are. An actual problem is an overeliance on photos, especially in these books where the photos already have all the visual information. I've talked more about this predicament throughout my blog already though.

Fiona Staples

 Fiona is a comic book artist primarily known for her work on the comic series Saga with writer Brian K Vaughan. She is also one of my all time favourite artists. Comics are one of my favourite art forms so this should be no surprise except I actually dislike most comic book artists. Broadly speaking I can divide most comic illustrators into two groups: one is an overly cartoony simple style and the other is a weird not quite realistic style (think most modern superhero comics). I find Staples' work a happy medium between something that is overly simple (boring even) and aims for realism in a medium where it is unattainable and just results in a grotesque unnatural look- all this is talking broadly of course.
Staples' work avoids being put into either of these categories by embracing the flatness which is inherent in comics while drawing skillful and detailed images. She does this by holding back on the variety of tones used and leaving her work relatively unrendered.
Linking to the other side of my project I would also say her characters have a strong sense of style which will always make something look visually better.
Another stand out thing about Staples' work that is particularly on show in Saga is just how imaginative she is. Saga is an epic space opera so literally nothing is off limits. The books are literally full of unique creatures and settings even when something normal could do. A simple way to put it is that she is a master of world (universe even) building. This is just as important as skill and style in my opinion when it comes to illustrating comics.

Image sources http://www.geeksofdoom.com/2012/03/12/check-out-this-preview-of-brian-k-vaughans-saga-1/2012-03-10-saga01_04
http://comicsalliance.com/josie-pussycats-life-with-archie-fiona-staples-variant-cover-24/
 

Her blog: http://fionastaples.tumblr.com/
It is mostly filled with sketches and work she likes as well as links to things that concern her like interviews and such.

David Downton

 To get my blog running I'm going to start by posting about some artists that link to my ideas for my project.
For the style side of my project David Downton was a pretty obvious choice. David Downton is predominantly a fashion illustrator who's been active for over 30 years,
Due to his focus on fashion he deals with many of the same things I currently am; predominantly clothing and hair. The thing about Downton's illustrations though which I believe is true for mine as well though is it isn't all about the fashion elements, you also get a strong sense of the person as well. This is the main reason I don't refer to this part of my project as 'fashion' because I feel the main focus is still the person.

I love how Downton uses suggestion in his work.You get the whole picture despite him missing out quite a lot of detail. He misses out large parts of outline and often uses large swathes of ink with little or no detail. Despite this the images look and are fully formed. This all adds to his strong sense of style which is important in fashion illustration. It also sets his work apart from numerous fashion photos which is something I'm struggling with in my practice at the moment. It seems I need to develop a stronger art style that will reflect the style of those I'm drawing.
The people I draw have a different but still just as strong sense of style as those Downton draws; this means I need a style just as strong as his but not like his as everything needs to fit together aesthetically. I'm finding aesthetic is very important for this half of my project.



Sources: http://www.daviddownton.com/couture/
http://www.daviddownton.com/portraiture/

Initial ideas/ Proposal

From the work that I did last year I have realised that there are two main strands to my practice.

One strand is work around a narrative like the work I did for my final project last year. This is usually comic based work although most work with a narrative or part of a series interests me for example I've been into story boarding a bit lately. 

The other strand is figurative based. More like the subculture project I did last year where the work is able to stand on its own and there is more freedom to how you make the work. As hair and clothes are my favourite things to draw I tend to end up drawing people with a strong or unique sense of style. This adds a strange fashion element to much of my work

I don't have any clear plans at the moment just vague kind of starting points that will hopefully lead to a more solid foundation soon.

Year 4, Final Year stuff

From here on out

 I've done quite a bit of messing around on Photoshop with my comic pages. This has mainly been colouring my pages but I've also explored playing with the backgrounds. I found some really cool paper in an art shop near where I live, I didn't know what I'd use t for at the time but it was really cool a knew I would find use for it at some point. The paper was handmade and had a really awesome sort of rough texture. I felt it would go really well with my kind of rough style I usually default to when I have no reason to use a particular style. I got plain hand made paper and two patterned ones; one with a marbled pattern and one with a black line-y pattern.
I realised when looking at my A3 comic pages that these patterned pieces might make good backdrops for the images.
I tried both and found that the marbled background actually works really well.

I was later colouring a full page image and kept feeling like the image was lacking somehow. I played around with using the paper as a layer and decided it worked really well at adding texture to the background so put it in over the background but behind the figures. I think the end result was very effective.

A big problem I've had with colouring on Photoshop is that the colours kept being too bold and bright. I tried to select more muted colours but this made too many of the colours similar or didn't make much difference. Bright and bold colours can be good sometimes but it didn't really fit with the mood I'm trying to set. Also a lot of what happens is at night so it wouldn't make sense for everything to be all bright and colourful. I got around this issue by colouring with the bright colours but at the end creating a layer over everything except the line work and filling the layer with a colour that sets the right atmosphere and reflects the setting and then changing the opacity of the layer until I think it dulls the colours in the way I want.

 To put my comic idea into action I started by planning out the pages very roughly in my sketchbook and then drawing a fuller version my A4 sketchbook. This let me figure out how I could make the pictures flow into each other and make sure the page works as a single image. Also I really enjoy drawing with pen and didn't want to leave that behind completely. After drawing a page in A4 I'd then copy the layout to A3 and draw it with ink and a brush. Usually this would be an almost exact copy from the A4 version just with some minor tweaks to make the image flow more or to overcome something that can't really be done using ink which I had put in the original piece.
For a lot of the pages I had trouble not using panels, so I did use them but made them sort of part of the background. This is mainly for the scenes in the park where most of the scenes were naturally framed by trees already. I went with this and framed the pages and panels with branches of trees which helped the page link together and become one image.

Looking at my pen and ink A4 versions and my A3 ink versions I think the A3 versions are stronger as they obviously develop from the A4 version and there are the advantages in drawing with ink that I talked about in an earlier post. I can however get a wider range of textures with pen so I may work into my ink pieces with pen to get a bit of range of texture.

As part of my outside of uni projects I've been submitting work to Stamp Press as a freelance designer. You can find my designs at Stamp Press, I only have a few at the moment but am going to continue submitting designs. The good thing about doing these designs is I can pretty much draw what I want however there are quite a few rules I have to follow such as only using original work and not copying from photos with any sort of copyright. There are also a lot of rules for how to format the image before submitting which can be a pain.
I've started by submitting drawings which I had done in a way that I knew would definitely be able to turn into a print, using solid lines and not getting into too much detail. I will explore a variety of styles however and see how far I can go with some styles while still having them be able to become a print.

Are You My Mother, Alison Bechdel

I was in Waterstones over Easter looking through their graphic novel section like I usually do and being for the large part unimpressed by the art style of most of the comics like I usually am. I did come across one Graphic Novel which's art style caught my eye and I really liked. That book was 'Are You My Mother' by AlisonBechdel. The art style is relatively simple and I'm pretty sure is drawn with ink just like how I've been working. I assume she's used a dip pen or something similar instead of a brush (like I am) because there is a lot of precision in the line work which can get quite fine at times as well. I really like the tonal work which is dome using various shades of ink. I like this because it means the tones aren't flat, you get slight variances and textures throughout the toned area which just makes the images more visually interesting while keeping them simple as well. There are other things in this comic I really like visually like how the panels aren't rigidly ruled out straight. They appear to be drawn freehand and I just really like the uniqueness of this lay out.
One of the main reasons I think this style works so well is that it is obviously hand drawn and so you never forget about the art or the fact that someone has drawn this. At the same time the art is skillful and it doesn't draw you out of the story but you still appreciate and notice the art which doesn't seem to happen in a lot of mainstream comics these days.

Packhorse exhibition

I had to do a bit of writing about my work for The Packhorse gallery

My work primarily explores depressions but the aspects I focus on can apply to many forms of mental illness. My work depicts people in various everyday situations with nothing out of the ordinary. The only exception to this is the creature that clings to one figure in each drawing. The creature represents depression and the personification of it in my art is the only clue the person is unwell. Other than the creature the person seems like any other mentally healthy person. This shows how anyone can suffer from mental illnesses and just because someone seems fine doesn't mean they aren't in a constant struggle. The creature varies in size throughout my work showing how depression sometimes affects you just a little, in ways you can deal with but sometimes it overwhelms you and there is not fighting it. I've used a variation of ink, pen and negative space throughout my series of work to try and convey the way depression must affect the person and their perception of the world at times when it is overwhelming or relatively dormant. 

J.H Williams III

 J.H Williams III is a comic book artist known for his work on Batwoman and his more recent work on Sandman Overture through which I discovered him. Again I got a bit lucky by stumbling upon a comic book illustrator who lays out his pages in a similar way I want to. I remembered a few comics I've read before where some pages have been laid out in a kind of panel-less one image sort of way but none were done with the skill or frequency as Williams' pages are.

Williams lays out seemingly all his pages in some kind of unique way, different from the usual rectangular, linear panels you usually get in comics, He often uses panels but the background is used to shape them so they seem to more naturally be part of the page and weave the page together.

I had been leaning towards the comic angle for doing this project for a while. I started originally by approaching the comic with the idea of doing each panel individually, sort of as a fully formed piece of art and then stitching the panels together on Photoshop to create the page. I was having a lot of trouble doing this. I never quite knew if one panel was finished and how much of the page I had done, it became very confusing and quite overwhelming.
One day I was looking through my memory stick for piece of work to play with on Photoshop when I came across the scans of the pages I did for my comic last year. I remembered how much more motivated I was for that project and how much simpler it was to create those pages. I realised I had to change my approach this comic concept from another angle. Almost straight away I drew up a page for my story using my storyboard thingy to plan out the panels. I drew the page in pen in a scratchy quick manner. This is partly to reflect the similar style I used for my comic last year but also because drawing this page was more of an exercise to get me thinking about the best way to approach making these pages.

It was a bit of a coincidence and partly down to not having a ruler handy but while penciling the figures into the spaces I knew the panels would be I realised that I could relatively simply get the images in my panels to merge together or flow into each other, essentially I could make an almost panel-less comic book page. I liked this idea a lot. After penning the page I used ink to accentuate the flow of the panels and try to make the page almost one image.
When I was halfway through this process and penning the figures, James came and had a look at my work. James knows a lot about comics so was quite helpful. He told me there were problems with this page specifically my panel lay out and the angles I've used break continuity and would break the immersion of the reader. I see what he's saying as I wasn't really thinking about that when drawing the page having just copied the panels over from my storyboard. I think James was a bit harsh in how much he said it effected the page as I know quite a few comics (Locas, Saga) which have some similar changes in angles and such but I think it may just be a difference in comic background. He still had a point though.

James also seemed to prefer my ink work to pen work. I pretty much agree with this assessment. I think it's because I'm not using reference material very much in this project meaning I'm making a lot of little mistakes in things like proportion. In pen this can come across as just seeming like mistakes (although I think often it works along with my style to create a unique and cool aesthetic) but with ink due to the loose nature of the medium it seems just more stylistic and is less noticeable.

This lead me to the conclusion that I need to make full comic pages using ink and a layout that leads the images into each other and makes the page look like a singular artistic entity rather than many images cobbled together.

I was watching the TV show Utopia the other day when I realised, it is shot in almost the exact same way as I would like my story to be shown. It has the same elements that make the Coen brother's and Wes Anderson's films visually interested but it comes across more intensely in Utopia. There seems to always be more space or framing in every scene and pretty much every shot is beautiful although sometimes in a horrifying or eerie way. If even half of my scenes could have the impact the cinematography in this show has then I would view this project as a success.

 Utopia may have also changed the way I want to approach doing work for this project however. Utopia centers around a graphic novel and the way this graphic novel looks is pretty awesome.

You don't see much of it throughout the show but when you do it doesn't look like a typical comic at all. The way the pages are laid out in a way
where there doesn't seem to be any panels, the images sort of just flow into each other and every page looks like its own piece of art, not just because a lot of the pages seem to consist of only one image. In the show the comic is essentially the ramblings of a mad man and in a way this is the sort of look I would like for my work. Sort of, I want the kind of roughness and jumbled together look the comic has. A problem with this is it could be really hard to do with a coherent story. Utopia can succeed at this because this graphic novel isn't real, what we see doesn't have to make sense and we can just trust the characters that it does. Mine however, would have to make sense.

I looked at a lot of Wes Anderson films to find just what it is that makes them so visually interesting and unique. It seemed to be due to most shots being centered and there being a strong sense of symmetry. This site pretty much confirms these theories (although it's in french so you can't be sure). There also seem to be a lot of lines in Anderson's frames which break up the shot and frame certain aspects of it. The colour palette is quite vibrant compared to how dull most films' pallets are and when the palette is muted there is usually an atmospheric reason. I'm not planning on colouring my work though so this is beside the point.


I also looked at some Coen brother films. I focused on No Country For Old Men (2007) because it's one of my favourite films and I remember it being shot in some really cool ways.

It also centers a lot of the characters in the frame and has in frame framing like Anderson's films do. Some other things I'd say about Coen films though are that they like using the foreground, midground and background to make shots interesting. The brothers also often leave a lot space in their frames which is really effective, especially in films like Fargo (1996) where the surrounding environment plays such a key role. Anderson also uses a lot of space in his work but not usually to the extent that the Coens do. The colour palettes in most Coen films may not be as lively as in most of Anderson's but this doesn't matter so much as a strong sense of lighting and consistent tone of palette still keeps the frames interesting throughout.
I've also just realised while writing this that both directors often use bird's eye view shots in their films and they are almost always interesting.
A problem with translating what I've learned into my practice however is that film frames are always the same size and ratio while I would probably work with a variety of frame sizes and shapes if I were to do a comic. This means that not everything I've learnt can be applied to every panel but I should still be able to make most frames interesting by going back to what I've learned here.