mindy indy @ Artists & Fleas semi-success?

The beautiful weekend meant a great turnout for the Artists & Fleas market!  mindy indy was placed next to Tony of "Golly," who makes custom T-shirts out of 70s/80s cartoon character bed sheets (like She-Ra, Transformers, etc).  I think it was a good pairing, and Tony was super supportive of me!  I learned a lot from him too.  I think he's in mid-blink in the pic, but there wasn't much time for pics as there were lots of people visiting our tables.  I also definitely need a huge background poster to attract people's attention!  mindy indy did ok sales-wise for the first time there, but the exposure was awesome.  Paid $90 for the table and only made $74, but that's a much closer gap than when I paid $150 for the Bronx con and only made like $40.

 

This time I sold The Misfortune Cookie comics for $3 each or two for $5, because of the context of the more artsy environment.  I was the only cartoonist there - that flea market is mostly for artsy vintage clothing.  I didn't sell as many comics, but I made just as much cash as when I sold 75 of them for $1 each.  I think I'll keep them at this price - it will save me lots of trips to Staples for printing, folding, and stapling them all.  Also, in the pic above, I tried to get a poll started asking if people would buy a Misfortune Cookie T-shirt or tote bag (same for Aer Head too).  One of my room mates suggested selling higher priced items at this venue, which is a super good idea.  Once I get a few more Misfortune Cookie stories out, I'll make a real "book" of them, but in the meantime, I'm not sure totes or tees would do that well at this time (although I didn't keep up on asking people about the poll...)

The cards did pretty well!  I KNEW they were a good idea!!  This time I sold them for $5 each, which is a fair, normal price for a card.  People seemed to like orange that day.

Random fact:  Did you know my drawing table can fold up?  I saved $10 by bringing my own table!

It was a pain in the ass to lug it all the way to and fro the subway stations though.  I mean, it was doable - it has a handle and isn't as heavy as a table could be (being aluminum).  But it was hella tiring!  Luckily some people helped me carry it partially on the way back.  It's hard to unfold too, it requires a screwdriver and it sticks.  Was it worth saving the $10?  Not sure, my arms still hurt :/  But it was an experience!  I think I'll wait awhile to do Artists & Fleas again until I have higher priced items, but I'm learning a lot!

Keep on Truckin'

This past week I've been working so much at my day job that it's been wearing me out!  But lots of work is a good thing.  Whenever I get a spare moment on the subway, waiting before an event to start, and in the late hours of the night, I've been fleshing out my storyboard.  I have most of the first episode of AERHEAD storyboarded and am filling in what  happens in between main events.  Last week you saw me take the pages off my wall and spread them on my desk.  This week I stacked all the pages on top of each other to see how it would read sequentially as a comic, which was super helpful in figuring out what I was missing:

It's pretty thick!  This makes me happy.  Here are some tidbits of drawings that are better than scribbles:

Storyboarding Storm

NYC has gotten hit with a couple bad winter storms lately.  One day, the heat in my apartment decided to take a vacation and left my roomies and I in the cold!  Hence the gloves (I love the finger/mitten ones!  You can actually grab things with them!)  I wished the sunny beach scene I was coloring could radiate heat.  I usually sketch in pencil but if there's a particular scene I need to test out I'll use color.

I've been storyboarding the rest of what will happen in the first episode of AER HEAD.  I took all the pages off the wall that would be in the first segment and spread them on my table so I could better see what I needed in between.  I counted 30 pages on the table, and I'm not even done with the whole thing, so it may be 2 comics instead of one, but I'll worry about that later.  The important thing is that I get all the important elements down and edit out over-explanatory details.

Oh and the heat was fixed by this picture.  I was just wearing the hat due to a bad hair day.  People suggest putting photos and videos of themselves on their blogs, but for me that requires looking presentable, which isn't how I usually look when I'm just in my apartment drawing.  Who really gets all dolled up just to sit at their desk and do artwork?  You're getting the real story here, people ;)

I've also made a tentative time line of when to finish storyboarding this segment and move on to comic page layouts.

Until next week!

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!

This is where the magic happens!

This week I give you a peek into the world of the mindy indy studio!

This is actually the other half of my bedroom.  I live 45 minutes away from the city in Brooklyn, so it's a fairly large room!  I salvaged that big table from my roomies (who were going to throw it out!) and it's perfect for spreading out all my supplies and having lots of room to work.  Tip to other artists:  SALVAGE!  Salvage EVERYTHING!  This past weekend I even salvaged a mini grill from someone in my apt complex = the ultimate delicious victory!  But I'm on a tangent...

I also got that tall standing lamp from my roomies - it's important for me to have lots of light to work under.  Um, almost everything in my room came from my roomies because they are awesome :)  Oh except the laptop - that's mine.  It's more than 4 years old and crashes regularly :\

All those little cards on the wall are my storyboards for the AER HEAD comic.  I'm going to do a whole post just about the storyboarding process, because there's TONS to say about it!  In the first picture, they were just words on index cards, but watch as they grow on my wall:

The storyboards have grown and have taken over my other wall!  Luckily I have lots of wall space, but I'm running out.  The full pages are drawn with pencil so that's why they don't show up as well, but that's ok - I wouldn't want to give away the story!

Of special note is the hanging teal colored thing on my closet - it's actually a travel make-up bag that I use to put all my art supplies in!  It organizes things SO effectively and I can SEE everything that's there instead of supplies being hidden in desk drawers.  Come to think of it, I can't imagine anyone needing THAT much make-up for TRAVEL... I don't even OWN enough make-up to fill one pocket!  Getting off that tangent, besides needing a new computer, I also need a new T-square because that one isn't square anymore!  I think it must have gotten warped somehow.

This is pretty much what my studio looks like now.  I was working on page 2 when I took this pic.  Here I have my watercolor supplies out.  It's important for me to clear my desk of most things before I begin working on a comic page because I don't work well with lots of clutter on my desk.  In particular, I clean between the inking and watercoloring stages of my comic, because both processes have tons of supplies and to have ALL of them on my desk at once is a disaster!

In retrospect, I'll take some pics with ME working in them in the future.

I've been creating page 3 this past week and will post that next week, and beyond that I'll explain more about those crazy storyboards all over my walls!  Lots to look forward to!