I was reading Scott McCloud's 'Making Comics' yesterday evening and saw a drawing that caught my attention. It was amongst drawings by a few other artists, but it still stood out to me. I wasn't sure why, so I looked at it and tried to figure it out. It was a simple drawing, two characters and two speech bubbles, consisting of no more than 10 words in total. The line work was bold, much thicker than the other artists drawings and far less detailed making them stand out even more. The simplicity of it made the story extememely clear. I have a lazy brain, meaning I'm drawn to simplicity. That's what was attracting me. It was about 3AM, but I wanted to see if I could replicate the style in my own drawings so I got up. I've been using my extra fine fountain pen over the past few months, meaning most of my work has been thin and technical. The lines often get lost when I add colour. I looked through my vast collection of pens and found the Pigma Micron 08, it worked perfectly. The lines are bold and clear. Not to mention the fact that the pen is fun to work with, as will all Pigma Microns I've used. They flow without fail. The ink is even and doesn't bleed on the 250 GSM card I'm currently stocking. Nor does it go through the page. I added colour and still the line work remained prominent and bold - exactly what I've been looking for. I'm not sure why I didn't try a thicker pen sooner.
I've been going through CV's and having calls with candidates all afternoon. Neither the CV's or candidates have really grabbed me so far. The work is awfully mundane, especially when I'm low on sleep. Lack of sleep always puts me in a bad mood. The call I just had was somewhat interesting. The guy had a positive attitude, and seemed to align with the role I'm recruiting for quite well. At least he thought he did. But I struggled to understand exactly why he thought that. As a non-technical person I depend on certain keywords in my approach to getting to know candidates. Which can of course be easily manipulated by individuals who know this is what recruiters do. It's hard to evaluate someone when you have no idea what they're talking about. Distinguishing between whether a person is making no sense, and making sense but just not to me, is tricky as I'm sure you can imagine.
In other news, I had a brain wave on the story front. Instead of struggling with printing text in the right place. I could instead write the text on screen and trace it by laying the paper over the screen and inking over the font itself. I did a little test run between calls and the output looks pretty sound. Easily readable, subtle uniqueness to each letter, solid underlying strucuture, no skewing of lines, good spacing, and good consistency in letter sizes. A great solution all in all.
I'd like to explain the scientific method now, using the new-found tools I mentioned earlier. First, I'm going to outline the scenes one-by-one quickly just to check it all works. I got into the second page and realised it makes more sense to just start making the damn thing.
- Write in prose
- Make comic with minimal words
- Write script
- Record rading script
- Combine comic and script to produce video (add SFX to supplement)
- Upload comic, final video, and journal to internet
- In future, video-record process and combine with voice-over using journal as reference (i.e. what to say in the voice-over).
But let's not get ahead of ourselves. So, I have prose in my head, this is the MVP of the comic- pure icons. Now, we have to transfer that into a recognisable comic. Which means drawing. Scary stuff. At this point I just need to accept it's going to be bad.
Or perhaps it wont go bad at all.
What a 360 of attitude.
It's amazing that only 5 minutes of dancing (if you can call it that) will do. What started as some imaginary skipping quicly transpired into hopping and jumping. Among all manner of arm waves and air punches. It's essential to move. Another way to get off your tits, on movement. And among the best, and most un-frowned-upon things you can do. Your body loves to move. Today I 'danced' for 5 minutes and 7 seconds (yes, I timed it). That's not at all bad for a beginner. When skipping, I could only manage 47 seconds. My mind is more preoccupied when dancing than skipping. I could really let my body take the wheel, whatever that means. Perhaps that I got out of the way, and let the unconcious have a turn. Somehow it knew exactly how to move me. Who'd have thought. The weed may have had a part to play in that. Hiroshi Suzuki's 'Cat' is phenomenal to dance to and not just because he's Japanese. I strongly reccomend you try it.