*AHEM* Dear Prof and fellow Special Projects classmates,
For my final project, I'd like to create a few short comics that will flow together and eventually become a graphic novel. Completing the novel would be grand, but I feel that target is overly ambitious for a 9-week timeline. Sice I'm a visual person (meaning I can't write for beans), for this project I will collaborate with my partner in crime, Jenny Kladzyk. She has a poetic writing style that's just down-to-earth enough to harmonize with my artistic vision. We hope to complete 8 pages every two weeks. This may seem like plenty of time to someone who's never made a comic, but unfortunately, I'm not Jack Kirby, and therefore can't pump out bi-monthly comics. I won't even go into the lengthy editing process...
This will be a "real-space", original work of fiction inspired by monotinous, everyday expierences/annoyances of the comic's creators. The plot, you ask? Simple answer: Combine a mundane life with no creative release and a few pills and you have a recipe for a perfect mental collapse. Synopsis: Ban, an American born man of Korean heratige, feels trapped in his drab existance. Between his nagging wife, annoying children, mysterious pills, minimum wage job and slimey boss, Ban comes to a breaking point. In the beginning, his mental breakdown mostly manisfests in his dreams. Slowly, his dreams become day dreams and his day dreams consume his thoughts, skewing the line between reality and the world that exists inside his mind. Our working title is "Melting Patterns".
I'm fairly certain my project will be the least "digital" in the class. I prefer old-school drawing styles (in method and asthetics), but I am Photoshop savvy and plan to use the program for most of the editing. This will help me resize, clean up and lay out our project panel by panel. Color will be important to the piece, but we're still not sure whether to work that out in PS or do it the ye-olde-fashioned, analog way: markers, colored pencils, etc. As for artistic influences...there are too many to name. I'll go with the top 3 comic book artists that move me (besides Sam Hiti): Nathan Fox, Josh Middleton, and James Stokoe. I'm sure it won't reach this impossible level, but for the final cut, I'm aiming for this: Clean, Middleton-esque reality scenes and crazy, Fox-inspired, acid-trippish scenes with vivid, Stokoe-like colors!
8 pages every two weeks is indeed ambitious, and if you get started now could yield 32 pages by the end of the term (how do you like those math skiils?).... I want to recommend that you and Jenny start with an overall 'storyboard' to get an idea of roughly what proportions of art-to-drawing will bring you to your goal. And it makes perfect sense that the digital component of your project will be editing (resizing, cleaning up, and laying out panel by panel). Do you know whether you want to have an InDesign-style file so that you can print (and possibly re-print down the line) as many copies as you want semi-professionally, or do you think you'll d.i.y. copies from a single paste-up you put together shoestring-style in Photoshop? Either way, why don't you try by next week to storyboard your production timeline (as opposed to just using words like most folk) and choose a Monday before the end of the month for a preliminary critique in class?
ReplyDeleteBan and Ezmerelda look great. Ban's wife is perfect -- like an animé Cruella Deville.
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