An Affair to Sort of Remember: my comic about how I met my husband

A frame from my comic. Do
You recognise one of the
characters?

I've been attending a graphic novel course taught by Emily Haworth Booth, winner of the 2013 Observer/Cape/Comica graphic short story prize (you can view her hilarious winning entry here).

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.

I especially love Marjane Sartrapi's
simple black and white vibe. Tried
to copy it and realised it's harder
than it looks!

Today comics are having a resurgence with exciting publishers like Nobrow and beautifully produced graphic novels of all genres.

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.

A Comic: An Affair to Almost Remember by Candy Gourlay from Candy Gourlay

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.