Workshop - Drawing Research

The official term is 'Graphic Facilitator'. Being a graphic facilitator sounds super fancy and intimidating, however, it's just drawing while people talk at you.

And I say 'just' like having people watch you draw isn't terrifying...

Anyway, about a week ago S, asked our class if anyone would be interested in having a go at being a graphic facilitator for some researchers who were going to come in and discuss with us what they're doing. Now, my initial reaction to anything that's sprung on me is 'nO!', but instead of saying that I said I'd think about it. I spent some time looking at the examples that S had provided and read a little about what would be expected - we would basically be turning their spoken word into images and text in the form of a mindmap - and decided that it sounded like a nice opportunity to do something a little different.

The actual day did get off to a rocky start though.

Everyone has been super busy lately, all across the uni, and so us illustrators arrived in good time at 12:30 - but the researchers didn't arrive until 1:30, a little sigh-inducing but it was okay. The wait didn't matter so much since it gave us a little time to get to know the other staff involved in putting together the workshop, and learn a little more about what was going to happen. Once everyone had arrived, we sat in a circle and introduced ourselves. The researchers were all in different stages of researching their PhD thesis', and the subject varied massively between them.

We then escaped from the massively hot and humid conference room up to our illustration studio and discussed who should be paired with whom.

I was paired with a man who was researching the building of sustainable housing and off-grid estates, right up my street! We got to talking about his work and the aim of reducing our CO2 output to zero by 2050, we agreed that it was possible, but not necessarily probable. He helped by jotting down how he thought some elements of the mind map might look - since this was for his research I wanted it to make sense to him more than anyone else. And as we continued talking, the mind map grew.

Now honestly, I was quite nervous of having to draw in front of someone, but it was very fun and easy once I put pen to paper and it didn't take long once we got going.

I hope that he will find the mind map helpful - even if it just makes him grin when he looks up from his desk as he continues his research journey. It would definitely be fun to do something like this again.

My partner mentioned that he'd also be giving a talk in one of the uni's lecture halls about climate change next week. I think this would give me a good opportunity to take first-hand notes on a subject I'm aiming to apply to future artworks, and a subject I'm passionate about.

I hope my final year continues to throw interesting opportunities my way as this one has been super fun,

see you next time,

Mort.

The Struggles of Drawing - Evaluative Blogs #5

It is usually at the start of a project that I question my life choices.

And boy did I when it finally came to sketching out my dream project of Razor derping about his life, very cleverly dubbed Project Razor. I began by doing what is expected of comics, I started at the beginning and put everything into panels.

Needless to say, I didn't get very far before I felt like I was banging my head against a wall of spikes. Turns out, drawing comics in panels is boring. Like, really boring. So boring that I only got four thumbnails in before I decided to start again.

This time, I started in the middle, and just drew. I thought more about movement and environment rather than telling the story in the way I'd structured it in my script and everything seemed to flow better. It was at this point that I returned from the holidays and talked through my progress with S.

We both liked the idea that panels aren't necessary for everything, but there were still some elements that lent themselves to being enclosed. We corrected some compositional problems, took some sections away, added some pages in, and S reminded me that negative space is important. It was then that it dawned on me that this wasn't going to fit into the nice twenty-two pages that I'd planned. It was going to be a lot more. But that didn't bother me so much, I was having fun.

I trundled my way through, frequently getting stuck on the action scenes, drawing despite myself, and returning to S for more feedback. This went on until the week before Summative Assessment - i.e. a week before semester two started - S suggested that since I have planned where Project Razor will start and end, I should pick out some pages to resolve completely and return to the rest of them in the future. This was reasonable, it would be horrific if I got to the end of the year with only sketches in my portfolio, that wouldn't help anyone. And so I must choose. What a task this was going to be.

Alongside Project Razor, I have also been working on a few other things in varying degrees of focus. I have been turning my as yet unshared Robin comic into an animatic - after a few wobbles of trying to get Sibelius onto my new laptop. I think this is going well, it's fun to play with music and picture again. I've come up with some ideas for a series of general illustrations that I may be able to enter into a competition - cryptids affected by climate change. This is still in the very early stages. And I've also completed an animation of chickens, the source material was very kindly offered by Hannah. As a thank you for getting this far, I will place it below.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/bb0054_707e468310c148348ade9ecdbd6edf97/720p/mp4/file.mp4

So that's my Christmas and first week back at uni summed up for now! I'm very excited for the final pieces that 2020 will bring, just gotta do the hard bit and draw them now.

I hope you've had a good new year so far, and that the rest of the year only gets better.

See you next time,

Mort.

Deciding on a Home for my Comics

There are many many many different hosting websites for webcomics out there, and making sense of it all is going to be difficult, and so I'm going to collate my research here, and hopefully find an answer to the question 'where shall I put my comics for you to enjoy?'

Initially, I simply looked into webcomic hosting sites such as Tapas and Webtoons (which I'll get into more later) what hadn't crossed my mind until I read this article by Things in Squares, was the possibility of sharing the pages of my comic on social media such as Reddit, Instagram and Facebook. I had always planned to share updates on my social media, but not necessarily the actual pages. This would allow my respective audiences on each platform access to my art without having to annoyingly follow a link onto a site that they may have a hard time using (I've certainly struggled to navigate some of these sites, and I'm supposed to be from the internet generation), plus it would share my work in many different places for more people to enjoy! So there is still some rumination on the social media aspect of comics - especially since I know little to nothing about Reddit, I hadn't even made an account until two weeks ago.

Tumblr and DeviantArt were also strong suggestions from others on the interwebs. However, I am of the understanding that these two sites, in particular, are flooded with users who are not exactly forgiving, and so I'd rather simply sidestep them altogether. Especially since, once again, I find them both hard to navigate.

Now for the sites that are specifically for hosting webcomics.

ComicFury

ComicFury is one that I've only heard of recently, as someone I know has switched from a different hosting site to here. I'm lead to believe that it's a relatively small platform, however you are featured on their site whenever you update your comic which seems like a mega pro to me! However, due to first impressions of the home screen, I wasn't filled with confidence that the majority of comics on there were going to be very good simply because of the web design. Upon closer inspection, each comic is provided with their own home page which is 100% customisable, great!

Another pro to this site is the forums (and how easily accessible they are) that they host which provide useful information for new members and creators - I had to search for a bit to find the forums on the other sites.

Tapas

I have used Tapas more than any other platform to read comics, but by golly do I have difficulty using it! If I've realised anything over the past few days it's that I'm an internet granny comparative everyone else. Tapas sports a big audience and they do have a 'fresh' tab, however, I've seen reviews of people being lost to the ether on there, despite the community being supportive. This was the platform I had planned to use before I decided to do some research.

Webtoons

I'm lead to believe that Webtoon hosts regular competitions although I couldn't, for the life of me, figure out where. If you become popular enough, I also believe they can recruit you as a paid contributor, however, a possibly hindering point was that most of the popular comics there seem to originate from Asia and are translated, so we can expect a very specific aesthetic from works that do well. I think we can safely rule off webtoons, for now, it seems like a 'later on in my career' option.

A universal thing that I noticed while scrolling through some comics on each site is that they all seem to be catered to reading on a phone (i.e. the panels mostly seem to take up an entire width of a page, with simple layouts and minimal detailing) which is a very reasonable thing to consider, however, I've not considered it at all - I've always had the intention of printing comics as books eventually - so I ask another question, is this even the right thing for me at all? Only more research will tell.

One last thing to consider would be to upload pages to this site. The major downside to this would be the minuscule chance of people stumbling upon my work through outside sources, and the best thing for me right now is exposure.

Leaving this for now, I'm torn between ComicFury and Tapas. ComicFury provides an individual site for each comic's creator and letting people know that you're hosted by them is optional, they even provide you with links so that your audience can share your work on other social media sites. It has a much more homely feel to it. Tapas is a big powerful beast compared to ComicFury, its branding is much more crisp, but it's obvious that it would be easy to get lost in such a big community plus there's no 100% customisable page. I also, personally, find it much harder to navigate.

If you have any suggestions or useful insights, please let me know!

Mort