Printing my books

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.

   

Recently I've been putting up my work for the degree show. I have quite a bit of space so am presenting quite a bit of work. I'm starting by putting my main series of work that I made specifically with this exhibition in mind in the centre of the space. This is 45 drawings in a 9x5 grid, each pinned up in each corner. This is influenced by the way Zak Smith presents his series of work such as A Drawing for Every Page of Gravity's Rainbow and Girls and Octopuses where he grids and pins large series of work simply with pins. I used very small thin dress pins to pin this series up to keep focus on the drawings, this lead to a lot of the pins bending but this actually fitted with the sketchy crude aesthetic of my drawing style.
Next, 180 pins later, I set to composing the work around it. This was hard especially as I couldn't try to many visually without covering my walls with various marks. I was attempting to get a balance of colour and size on either side but not being overly symmetrical because that's boring  and doesn't suit my sketchy rough style. After playing around a bit and discussing various compositions with my course mates I settled on the one that sounded best and doable. I pinned in my 'neater' work that was A6 or over with the same pins as my main series. For my smaller work I used double sided sticky tabs as they were so small that a pin or nail could ruin the tiny image. For the series of work you can see on the right I used larger nails to attach them to the wall. This is because these works are a lot rougher and more chaotic (hence the scattered layout), using delicate little pins didn't seem right while larger (only slightly) nails have more of a rougher affect that suits the aesthetic of the series.


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.

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

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.

Arizona and Scotland and Work

Dimitar Marinski

Dimitar Marinski affected my work in a very similar way to Pablo Carpio. He draws big sprawling landscapes, good for atmosphere with some suggestion of people and things going on.
Unlike Carpio though a lot of Marinski's work deals with greener more nordic sorts of landscapes, Carpio, did a lot of desert and plains. A lot of his imagery reminded me of Scotland, conveniently the place I had lived last year. I looked over photos I took over that year and decided to use them in this new type of work I was doing. I also realised that my friend is currently doing a year of uni in Arizona, where many classic Westerns are filmed (monument valley and such). I had him send me photos he'd taken and using a combination of his Arizonan desert photos and my Scottish mountainous photos started creating more composed, big, montage landscape work for my comic.
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.

Comic inspiration

 I've already talked about a few comics that influenced my comic project but now I'm going to talk about a few that influenced me in unique ways, be it a none typical layout, different materials or a non traditional style.

Low, Reminber, Tocchini

Low is interesting because of Tocchini's loose art style. Visually the work is striking and very interesting but the looseness, almost ethereal quality of the line work can make the comic not as clear as it could be at time. I think the uniqueness of the style is worth this though as it has such a strong aesthetic quality

Sculptor, McCloud
I have talked about Scott McCloud in a few posts, mainly about his comic understanding comics, in which he looks in depth at the history and structure of comics. Sculptor is his latest comic and I had to read it as he is such a knowledgable guy when it comes to comics. The first thing I noticed about Sculptor that is different to most comics is that it is all black white and blue, the blue being uses as shading. This gives the comic depth and variety that can be hard to achieve with just black and white but maintains the strong, clear, graphic quality generally best encapsulated by pure black and white work. The use of blue also gives the comic a sort of subtle sadness or melancholy atmosphere throughout that fits it's tone.
Also notable is the variety of paneling. McCloud often uses lots of little panels, sometimes this is to work as a sort of montage but also can be used to create tension or slow down important moments. Essentially it comes down to controlling time. This is something Scott McCloud is very good at as he understands every panel effects how the viewer reads time as well as the type of panel transition being used.


Snowblind, Masters, Jenkins

I haven't actually read Snowblind I've just seen it around and because of it's unique, strong style it stuck in my mind. The art style looks very traditional for this day and age, I don't know how the illustrations are actually done but it looks like it's coloured with water colour or something similar. More importantly to my project the line-work looks like ink, what I use, this is because there is an inconsistency of the line thickness and that the lines seem a bit insecure, loose but in a different way to Tocchini's style. It gives a kind of sketchiness to his work which I really like, to me this line-work is more visually interesting than the normal well defined but plain line-work found in most comics. I don't really like the colour work though as I find it too weak and wishy-washy, it's not intense or bold enough.


Mirror, Rios, Hwei Lim

I have never seen a comic anything like Mirror before, and I doubt there is one. Everything about it is unique. The panel shapes, page layouts, colouring and line-work are all unlike most other comics. Panels are cut up without any structural reason to separate elements, act as windows and certain ways of framing. Elements are constantly breaking out of the confines of the panels, characters appear multiple times in panels showing movement and time progression, their is also a large amount of imagery outside the panels completely. The line work is very sketchy a lot like a pencil drawing and the colouring is very like Snowblind in it's water colour like paintly style. All these elements together make it truly a unique experience, even if one aspect doesn't work all that well it still sort of fits with the style because their isn't anything else like it. This comic is good proof that there doesn't have to be any rules when making a comic, you can be as experimental as possible.

Sources
https://imagecomics.com/uploads/news/0809_LOW03_COLORS.jpghttps://imagecomics.com/uploads/releases/spotlight-intvw-mirror-01-03.jpg
http://static.comicvine.com/uploads/original/0/40/4903618-2+snowblind_001_06.jpg https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhO8y0Tn5ig5K74PjAvtHVPgoD6rjTJhyphenhyphennyUcVk8U3Wu6KBIfFzyR8FLJLfjSZCayOzjP2LdJiUqL5u_VlkA9g0b2x4fnm60SxtvX0e3bfnxBJ7MilcQ438Z9UyBMKCcgEToXk06fa3gnm1/s1600/panels1.png