Comics Workshop 18th March

The week of the 18th of March was an incredible one at Glyndwr.

We welcomed two guest lecturers, one from the Netherlands and one from Poland. Their aim was to teach us something wonderful, and boy they smashed it.

The first day involved the two guest lecturers (having only just arrived from their respective countries) tell us about their work, and what they would ultimately like us to take away from this week.

There was a workshop on the intricacies of designing a mural, and a different workshop about freeing up the creative process of making a comic - you can guess which one I chose!

Initially, we were asked to bring a pre-prepared sequence of images. It had to be something that we weren't too precious about and was already a complete artwork in itself. Having just come back from the Leiden trip, I chose to use that comic.

Firstly, we began by redrawing the comic in black and white. We weren't even an hour in, and I was stumped.

Now, until I got to this point, I had always shrugged off black and white styles as being somewhat lazy, or that they didn't have a solid grasp on handling colour. BOY I WAS WRONG.

Working with black and white, you cannot hide anything, and if your tonal range is too flat then your work is going to suck. I'd also left all of my usual tools back in the house so my watercolours were effectively confiscated. Struggling on, I only got two pages of the original five drawn out in the time we were allowed.

The point of this exercise was to make us think more about the shapes that were present in our work rather than the narrative and subject matter. The only panel that I thought I'd achieved that in was the penultimate panel on the second page. It lacks anything figurative and could be taken as something completely abstract.

The next exercise was to redraw someone else's comic. We could add and take out anything we wanted to, which was exciting and scary. I had the pleasure of redrawing a comic about nightmares which totally contradicts my style, it was a really fun exercise. I had a great time using a multitude of pens and watercolour pencils to create mood, and the scribble-y shadows as the head were super fun to draw. If you're interested, the original comic belongs to this lovely artist right here: https://www.instagram.com/kaimasaima/

After redrawing someone else's comic, it was now time to photocopy everything we'd drawn in order to collage panels so that they looked appealing and pleasing to the eye. This was rather liberating in a sense, I went through multiple layouts with paper strewn everywhere - my desk was chaos incarnate. The combination of a lot of skulls and the stark contrast of black and white meant that a lot of death was implied in my collage. We then had to repaint the collage, while trying to incorporate a hint of narrative and this is where it took an unexpected turn.

Through all the skulls and silly message of the original comic, this new narrative slowly began to turn into one involving masks and a lost sense of identity. The repainting of the collage left something to be desired - the grey tones mixing too well and creating a kind of tonal mush - so I asked for feedback and moved on from there.

From an outside perspective, the narrative wasn't wholly clear and so I developed the comic into two pages. Once I was happy with that, I began to work mostly in brush pen and fine liner to negate the grey mush of previous versions. I think this worked well, and gave the narrative more depth than it would have if I'd used colour. This black and white reworking became my final piece of the week.

Overall, having someone from a different university come in to talk to, and teach us was invaluable. Each of us learnt to experiment more with our creative process, and I for one learnt to appreciate the skill required to work in black and white.

If you'd like to know more about the mural part of the week then check out my friend's blog! https://hghillustration.co.uk/blog/f/my-mural-workshop

See you next time,

Mort