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.