Teaching Kids Comics @ Utrecht

Had a blast teaching kids how to draw and ink comics at Utrecht Brooklyn this past Saturday!  Lots of talented kids (and their parents!) came and I taught them step by step how to create their own character and three panel comic strip.  When it got to the inking part, I was a little nervous having open ink bottles around kids, but everything was ok.  We mostly inked with Micron pens :)  I did get to show them a little of how you can fill in large areas of black with a brush and ink, and how to do ink washes.  Initially I thought it would be more of an inking demo to show college students how to use the supplies (this Utrecht is right by Pratt University).  The students seemed busy buying art supplies for the back-to-school season, though.  But live events are always different and turn out great.

With each new event I do I learn something.  I usually teach on a big white board to a big class (at MoCCA), but this time I drew on a bristol board page to show how cartoonists really create their art.  I had to keep turning the page around so kids wouldn't see it upside down!  Also, it's difficult to do a linear step-by-step routine when people are jumping in at different times.  I had to keep tabs on who was at what point while I started over again with new people.  I did have some already-drawn simple comics for people who wanted to just jump in with the inking.  Maybe I'll do more of that next time.  It was a super fun experience though and I love doing this stuff!  The Utrecht manager said the event got lots of positive feedback and maybe they'd have me do another one!  It's good publicity for me and I sold a few comics, but most of all kids had tons of fun learning and drawing!

The Misfortune Cookie 2

This is what I spent so much energy on last week.  I'm still recovering from cramming it all into a few days, but I was able to do it!

All the Misfortune Cookie stories will feature different characters each time, but the main character is the misfortune cookie itself.  It can happen to anyone, anywhere, anytime!  This story started with the image in my head of two friends breaking open all the cookies.  I was watching lots of South Park at the time, so I wanted them to be mischievous little boys!  Oh also, "Diablo" is a computer game that my room mate was playing a lot.

Gangsta

This week I've been learning a lot more about creating the 3D characters in Blender - a bit more tricky that animating them (I guess it depends who you ask!)  The above image is a character from a new 3D comic of Kyle Baker's.  He needed to make lots of gangsters, so he gave me the file of this basic gangster (above) and wanted me to change their clothes, hair, skin tone, etc so it would create many individual gangsters quickly.

You can not only change the color of a character's clothes, but "map" a texture onto it.  This was my favorite part!  Above, the black+yellow striped square was an image I found online and modified.  I picked all kinds of funky textures for the different characters, to which Kyle said "What kind of gang IS this??"  see below:

That's what happens when you put me in charge of outfits :)

Wrapping up the TNH animation.  It's in the final editing stage.  Above is a screen shot of me animating the chick, Officer Peep, driving a car.  Yes, it's a cartoon so s/he (we haven't decided it's gender) really can drive that way!  See the animation in the TNH2 link from last week's post.

In other news, drew more Aer Head yesterday (finally!) but that's for another post.  I also don't have a scanner at the moment.

AER HEAD chronology

A new addition to mindy indy is a new page just for the finished pages of AER HEAD!  There's a link that says "AER HEAD" on the upper right corner of this webpage.  Click it and you'll see all the pages in order, instead of having to skim through old posts backwards.  Yeah... I know it's still the same 5 pages.  But know that I'm making progress! In other news, the New York Comic Con is coming up in 2 weeks!  I'll be there trying to get more coloring work and learning more about self publishing.  I think I need to self publish AER HEAD first, then once people see it, other publishers may want to pick it up.  I need to keep my rights though.  That's super important, because too many artists sell out their dreams to big companies and the artist gets nothing in the end.  My boss (Kyle Baker) keeps mentioning the Super Man creators.  Near the end of their lives, they were homeless while Super Man was known as the most popular comic character, making movies and lots of money for other people.  I've learned so much, not only by being his assistant, but just by being around Kyle because he tells me lots of history about the comic business and about his own experiences.

In other OTHER news, I started taking a "Figure Drawing for Graphic Novelists" class at the School of Visual Arts.  It's taught by Tom Motley, and I'm learning so much!  At first I was apprehensive about taking this class in the middle of drawing AER HEAD, because I didn't want to feel compelled to redraw the whole thing again after I got better and realized all the old drawings sucked.  But I brought some of my comic pages to class and Tom recommended some tweaks, but I wouldn't have to change the whole positions of characters (so far).

So lots going on over here!  Stay tuned.

Surf's Up!

I've been drawing lots of the surfing poses lately.  When I get into a groove, I like to draw similar pages or subjects all at once.  I looked online for reference pictures.  And this is the first "full" page I've posted in quite some time.  I felt this page doesn't give anything away, so it's safe :)

I actually haven't surfed before, but I'd like to learn someday!   You may ask:  why would you make a comic about that, then?  Well, surfing is something the characters DO, but it's not the main focus of the comic.  It's like how I love to go to concerts and go jogging, but it's not part of my artistic work.  I want to make my characters well rounded.  What IS the main focus of the comic, you may ask?  There are many foci, but one is about learning how to discover your true abilities.

Layouts

I've finally moved beyond the storyboarding part of the comic this past week!  I filled in all the gaps of the first episode and made sure everything flowed well and made sense.  Onto the next stage:  page layouts!

A layout is a general page composition.  I use circles and boxes to fill where characters and speech bubbles should be.  Layouts are important before doing detailed drawings so I don't have to erase them later if the composition isn't working.  Sometimes if I have a really clear layout, I get carried away at this stage and start to draw details, like below:

This is Pipsy remembering Aeryan growing up.  And yeah I can't deny that that page looks like anime :P

Sometimes I daydream about how great it will be when my AER HEAD graphic novel will be complete, but then I remember that the fun is in the journey and process of making the comic.  I'll continue to work at a steady pace, but I don't want to rush AER HEAD because I keep thinking of more cool ideas to help its story grow.  Rome wasn't built in a day.

"Oh, it looks like anime!"

That is what many people say when I hand them my business card:

To which I cringe, because while I love and have been greatly influenced by anime and manga (see my Inspirations post), I am actually trying hard to make my comic NOT look like anime!  I'm trying to emerge my own unique style, and I don't like it being categorized like that when I know there are differences between my style and anime style.

"What about it looks like anime?" I sometimes ask.  The character's eyes aren't showing on the card, so it can't be huge typical anime eyes.  People are usually stumped here and say "Um, it just does!"  One guy said "The mouth looks like anime!"

When I invented my AER HEAD characters years ago, though, the style was VERY anime:

Those eyes are GINORMOUS!  Now THAT looks like anime, no doubt about it!  That's a screen cap from an animation I did in 2004 called "Cute but Deadly."  Btw, the character on the left in green (Andy) is the same one on my business card.

But even now, when I sketch characters really quickly, the style tends to look anime-like, maybe because it's more simplified:

But to me, my final comic pages these days don't jump out at me and say "anime."

There is probably the underlying anime drawing style still there, and as much as I try to change it, it still shines through.  One of my professors said that sometimes you just have a certain style, and nobody can beat it out of you.  But hey, maybe the anime-like style will attract some anime fans :)

Storyboarding

Yes, I DID draw that pic just for this subject ;)  Storyboards are a series of pictures used to visualize a movie or animation.  They are usually based off a script and are an essential step before filming or animating.  Comic books are storyboards in themselves (which is part of why there have been so many comic book movies out recently - the storyboards already exist!).  I'm using my own kind of storyboarding process for the AER HEAD comic.

AER HEAD is a very long story.  Before this, I had done short stories of 6 to 17 pages, so tackling this was pretty overwhelming at first.  I've sketched these characters for years, and attempted to make the first part of the comic before (I'll post that after this version catches up ;) ) but I realized the big picture had lots of plot holes, I didn't know how characters would get from place X to place Z, the villains were unclear, and it didn't have much character development, so I put the story on hold.  For awhile I still had all these half baked ideas floating around in my head, but this summer I realized if I don't do the comic now... when will I do it?  Next year?  5 years from now?  No, carpe diem!

So first, I looked through all my sketchbooks (about 12) to remember what I had sketched about the story over the years.  I had totally forgot about some things!  Which is why sketching them down is so important.  Then, I wrote pieces of the story on index cards and put them on my wall.  That's how I was taught to do it in animation classes in college.  I drew images for the college storyboards, but I wrote for AER HEAD because I was still in the general concept stage and didn't want to worry about committing to drawings yet.  The index cards allow me to easily switch parts of the story around, take parts out, and add parts in.  I hung them in a time line like fashion to help me figure out what needed to happen between place X and place Z and other places.  This was really helpful and I kept thinking of more and more things to happen!

One time I was talking with a cartoonist friend and he said he drew small thumbnail sketches of his whole story before doing the real drawings.  Thumbnails are really small, like a couple inches high.  They help to get the basic layout and pacing of a comic.  So I was like, "All right!  I'm going to draw the WHOLE THING out!"  Which didn't last long... I kept getting stuck, was thinking way too hard about it, and underestimated the amount of time it would take.  Sometimes the creative process is organic and you can't force it, and what method may work for one artist doesn't necessarily work for another.  So take my crazy process with a grain of salt ;)

I started sketching some whole pages.  I don't like drawing small, and I invent the dialogue as I'm drawing, so I used regular typing paper to fit everything in.  Here's a close up of the storyboards for the first 2 pages:

Sometimes the storyboards are more detailed like page 1, but mostly they're very sketchy and basic like page 2.

I mentioned that storyboards usually come from scripts, and while I didn't write one for AER HEAD, I read many screen writing books to help me "write" visually.  Some of them were:

Robert McKee:  Story

Madeline Di Maggio:  "Screen-Writing" Insider Tips and Techniques to Write for the Silver Screen

Peter Dunne:  Emotional Structure

I didn't read them all through, but definitely the first couple chapters and skimmed the rest.  There were some other "writing for TV" books that I had to return before I read them, but I forgot their names... but just look in the library and they'll all be in one place.  I also looked at Scott McCloud's "Making Comics."  All these resources combined helped me to move my story forward, cut things out, create conflict, and develop characters pasts and inner desires.  I also learned about things like character arcs vs story arcs, the difference between plot and story, and technical terms like archplot.

I went to the New York Comic Con this year and they had a panel called "Writing Character Driven Stories," where I learned about the impact character, holistic vs linear thinkers, and mental sex - like if a male character thinks like a female (which my male characters might turn out to be like, since I'm female and can just guess how guys think.  Gotta work on that mind-melding technique... mindyindymindmeld!!)

Ok, so that's a lot of info to digest!  I'm still storyboarding as I go along.  All the pages you see here...

...are probably like 1/20th, or maybe 1/40th, of the whole story.  One of the fun things about writing as I go is adding stuff that strikes me at odd moments like "Eureka!"  A potential drawback to writing as I go is if I want to add more info to past pages, I run into problems.  But at this point, I don't want that to hold me back.  It's important to JUST DO IT.

PS:  Yeah I know I said I'd post page 3 this week, but lots of crazy things happened and I didn't get to watercoloring yet.  I'll have it for next week!