Push your talent
October 10, 2017
This is my first attempt at a page for a comic strip or graphic novel. The hardest part, so far, is unifying the look and the palette.
In this romp through the forties (above), I came up with the drawings before I had a story in mind. Now I’m gathering them up in sequence to see how they look together and what story emerges. Not bad.
In another project I have on the boil, I have an entire story, but no drawings. It’s a short story I wrote four years ago that I want to try and map out visually.
Most illustrators I’ve looked at can draw in many different styles, but they choose a style appropriate to each story or assignment so it reads cohesively. All of these are revelations to me as I delve back into my childhood pastime: art.
Over the last year, I have posted drawings in every illustration style imaginable to my Instagram feed, from hand-drawn sketches to digital posters. I’ve been doing that to test the what I like doing, and find out the limits of my talent. Some styles (like loose brush strokes) hide what I haven’t mastered yet in human anatomy. Line drawings, on the other hand, force you to be accurate with things like hands and foreshortening. I have a multitude of challenges ahead of me that regular life drawing classes could fix.
All in all, I love seeing my progress. It’s impossible to miss since Facebook keeps throwing up anniversary posts, showing me what my drawings looked like a year ago. I’m getting better.
#GraphicNovels #cartoon #illustration #pentelbrushpen
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