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| A frame from my comic. Do You recognise one of the characters? |
When I was a child, a cartoonist was one of the things I wanted to become. In fact, I did have a weekly comic strip in a Philippine women's magazine for a while. But real life intervened and I became a writer.
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| I especially love Marjane Sartrapi's simple black and white vibe. Tried to copy it and realised it's harder than it looks! |
I have become addicted to the autobiographical work of artists such as Craig Thompson (Habibi), Alison Bechdel (Fun Home), Guy deLisle (Pyongyang), Art Spiegelman (Maus) and Marjane Sartrapi (Persepolis). I signed up for the course to see if I could do something similar.
Here is my final project. Click on the view full screen icon on the bottom right corner to see it in full view.
If you look closely, you can see that I'm learning as I go along. At first I tried to draw and lay it out directly on the page. But I discovered I couldn't do straight lines so I had to admit defeat and lay it out on Photoshop.
I tried doing a technique of pencilling then copying the images on a lightbox but I found the second time I drew an image, it lost all its energy. So these are a combination of pencilling things in and drawing straight on the page, then erasing my mistakes on Photoshop.
A lot of the techniques of developing a story are similar to building a novel. If I had the time, I could add a couple more pages to this story. I left out some interesting bits!
It was so liberating to get out of the writer's cave every Thursday night and do something other than writing a novel. And it was fun meeting other people with a love for comics. My classmates were such accomplished artists. And young.
I'm looking for another graphic novel class to attend in the autumn.
