Week 4 and 5

Yesterday the three weeks course ended. The past two weeks we have had Johan Krarup (http://jfkra.dk) and Lars Hornemann (http://larshorneman.blogspot.dk), both danish cartoonists, as teachers. Johan taught us the process of going from a concept/manuscript to drawings. This week Lars was there to help us ink our comics. It was also a very big part of the lesson to plan out how we could make the deadline, which was friday at 12 (13 if you didn't have lunch). This made a time schedule where we could use 3 hours per page. Of course it took much longer.

Anyway here is the product of three weeks of work ! :

I inked it all with a brush on A3 size paper. It was fun inking with a brush and I will definitely do it again. Most of the colors were done really fast friday morning in photoshop. When I realized that the line art reminded me a bit of a Will Eisner comic I had lying on my table all week I decided to be inspired by the colors too. And when I think about it, from the very beginning of this comic I wanted to do something that reminded of the structure of this Spirit story. So everything makes sense.
I thought I was going to color the pages better after the deadline yesterday, but then again it is nice to just be done with it. An important lesson I will really have to remember forever is that you don't finish your work - you release it.


Here is an Eisner page.

A very helpful exercise we did this week was to ink another persons page. I felt that when I wasn't working on my own stuff I could relax and experiment more. I switched a page with Fie. Her story is called Gehirnswitch and is set in the Ardennes some time towards the end of WW2, where a british soldier is killed. His brain is taken by the Nazis and put into a war robot. On this page he rebels against the Nazis:

It was also really inspiring to see what both Fie and Clara did when they had to ink pages from my comic.

3. week

A simple drawing has to be drawn simple... or else it's not simple...!
 - Thomas Thorhauge

Some of the things Thourhauge does

This week has been the first week in a three weeks course, where we will go through the whole pipeline of creating a comic, but condensed. Our teacher has been the danish cartoonist Thomas Thorhauge who talked a lot about intellectual property, how to earn money on drawing comics, networking etc. The whole week has been about world building and all the creative work you do before you actually starts producing material for a comic.

So the assignment on monday was to come up with a setting for a story, but not a story. Only criteria was that it had to be impersonal, so kind of the opposite of what we did with Paul Karasik. We had to present the setting on a piece of A4 paper by the end of the day, with two drawings of the setting and a sentence describing it.
And then - ! - we had to turn our paper over to the person next to you. This was really a shock for the first five minutes, but then I became pretty happy that I didn't have to use my own setting: my childhood city split in two by the railroad, inhabited by flowers. Now the criteria for the product in two weeks, an eight page comic, is that it has to be true to the style and concept of the original setting we got.

So the next comic you will see from my hand is about a fairy city built out of trash and organic materials set in the jazz age! tadaaa.

Here's the concept sheet I got from Simone (www.iamsimo.tumblr.com):

Here are the first concept sketches I did this week. I don't think the comic will look like this though... I need to figure out how to make it less ugly. But still a little ugly. There will be gradients, I can promise that.

Besides 1920's Vogue illustrations, art deco patterns and flowers, this 3D effect postcard hanging on my wall is a great inspiration source at the moment:

Week 1 and 2 with Paul Karasik

The past two weeks have been an introduction to comics making. Our teacher has been the very nice and tall man of Paul Karasik, who adapted Paul Auster's City of Glass into a beautiful graphic novel in 1994.

An analysis of the 1930's newspaper comic strip Nancy by Ernie Bushmiller became the starting point to understanding the fundamentals of comics language. Our first task was by using the understanding of this strip: ...

... to draw the last panel in two other Nancy strips.

My attempt to think like the genius! of Ernie Bushmiller:

Here are my notes on the whole thing: 

All these things are observable in the first Nancy strip.

Our second task was to create a 3 page "How To..." comic. An instruction in how to do some everyday action. I chose to do "How to read a book". When the three pages were done we were told to condense the three pages into one.

The result:

The last big task has been to make an autobiographical story into a twelve page mini comic. I haven't finished inking the pages, but I will some time this week and then I will upload it here. All the stories people have told are really great, some are horrifying, others hilarious. 

 

Here my comic finally is (uploaded the 16. of September). It is called Night Out.

 

The two weeks have been amazing and I am starting to look at comics in a new way. It is inspiring to be among people who all have different jumping off points and inspiration sources. I have opened my eyes to the comic art of Chris Ware and Osamu Tezuka among others, whom I haven't really gotten before. 

Paul Karasiks way of working is a very methodical way, where you really work out the whole structure of your story before anything else. A mantra has been that comics is a reductive language and that form follows function. I really love this way of working, since I am not - at the moment - necessarily that much into drawing as I am to planning, structuring and writing (i.e. telling a story). The drawings kind of comes in second at the moment.

I am so excited about the next four years.......... wohoo.

PS: We analyzed and read some really amazing comics during these two weeks, and I want you to check this out: Dreams of the rarebit fiend by Winsor McKay, the guy who also did Little Nemo in Slumberland. Dreams of the rarebit fiend is the adult version of the Nemo comics, where every page will contain a nightmare and in the bottom right corner, the dreamer who has woken up. This one is really beautiful, and you really don't have to read the balloons to get it: