The Return of the Comics

A few of you may remember Escape from Camp Artemis, the short comic I put together a couple of years ago. A 12-page story about two girls who escape from summer camp, the comic was put together as part of a class I took at Meltdown Comics. The project was a fun one, and I was happy with the result; it was nice to have a little story that I could hand out and share with friends. Many people really enjoyed seeing it, and my instructor encouraged me to keep making more comics after the class was over.

While I had ideas for fun follow-up projects, it's been hard to muster the energy to get them off the ground. It can take a lot of effort to even create an individual piece of art; it is even more intimidating to commit to a project that involves putting together story outlines, designing characters and environments, writing dialogue, creating dozens of individual drawings, and finding a way to display them on a page in a way that flows and serves the story. And, because you have to stick with the same style and designs for the entirety of a project, it is easy to become critical of your preliminary designs and ideas, leading to inertia.

However, finally, I've begun to get past that inertia and put a new project together. I've had a basic idea and an outline for a while, but I still stalled out when I got the stage of actually drawing the thing. Beginning anything new can be daunting, since you can't look back on past work and show yourself that you're making progress, but I am now putting pen to paper (well, to digital tablet) and taking those difficult first steps.

This new project is a little more ambitious than Escape From Camp Artemis, which was a little more self-contained. The process of putting the pages together is also a little bit different; with the prior comic, I drew everything by hand and made some minor tweaks and adjustments in Photoshop, but this time I'm doing all the work on the computer. Unsurprisingly, the increased use of technology has certain advantages and disadvantages, and it leads me to change my approach to drawing a comic in various ways.

When I drew the comic by hand, I started by drawing a rough pencil version of the poses, and further refining it by drawing a rough pen version over the pencil lines. Then, using a lightboard, I would take my nice pens (and sometimes a bit of wite-out) and create a "clean" version by tracing the rough drawings onto a new sheet of paper, making modifications and adding details as needed. In Photoshop, I have access to an infinite number of "layers," which I can use to sketch out and refine the drawings. And, because it is easy to erase missteps completely, I can obtain a higher degree of precision in my drawings. If something looks a bit off, I can endlessly tweak and modify it, even experimenting with different "solutions" to fix the image.

In addition, drawing digitally makes it a whole lot easier to use references for things like character poses, furniture, and outfits, since you have access to any reference image you need at your fingertips. So, rather than dressing my characters in more "generic" outfits, or creating basic environments out of thin air, I can scour catalogs and do image searches to find "props" or "costumes" that are close to what I would like. Because I find it useful to have these references around, it has motivated me to revive my long-dormant Pinterest account as a place for me to accumulate images I might need later on. It's helped to improve my visual storytelling, since those little background details (what snobs like to call mise-en-scène) can provide useful information about the characters and setting without requiring anything in the way of exposition or direct explanations.

It can be tempting to use these references as a crutch, and there's a risk that outside references could be incorporated in a way that is awkward and doesn't mesh well with the rest of the image. Still, as long as I'm careful to use references in the right way, they allow me to make a comic that is a tad more visually sophisticated.

The biggest adjustment I have to make involves being able to conceptualize the "big picture" composition when I'm working on a piece. When I'm using an actual piece of paper, it is easy to see the full image and make sure the subsections work together. It is also easier to put two pages side by side to make sure that there aren't any jarring stylistic differences from page to page. When working in Photoshop, however, there is a tendency to zoom in so you can make the drawing smoother and more precise, which makes it more difficult to simultaneously work on drawing a part of the comic and make sure that your drawing supports page as a whole. Nonetheless, that challenge can be overcome by zooming out and creating a rough framework for the page, as you can refer to this framework while filling in the details of the comic.

I am hoping to keep up my energy for this project, and am hoping to see some good results in the coming weeks and months. Even though I have just started, it is nice to be working on a long-term creative project and keeping a particular skill set fresh.