Blast from the past 2: Roads? Where we're going we don't need roads.

Alright, round 2. [fight.]

Where I left off last time, I had just written my mediocre short story. It was extraordinarily average, so I needed to cut down, crop, enlarge the good moments from it to make it interesting at all.

If you read the last post, the main problem was that I tried to fit too much story in a tiny bit of space, so it ended up being as bad as a bullet pointed list of plot. My answer to this problem was to choose what I thought was the most important part, Kai's action of leaving, and explore this time as thoroughly as possible. The way I did this that I thought would make the images play a crucial part in the story was to not look at my short story at all. Instead, I chose to imagine the concept of leaving and story boarded the images out without any real concept of the text that would fit in.

The result were the following story boards.

After these drawings got cranked out, I found that I had a real framework that I could build from finally. All these images seemed to really click with the first ones that I had produced in my sketchbook way back in August (for those keeping track of the timeline, this storyboard is from the beginning of January.)

After this point, I looked at each page from the story board and started writing my text. I had just started reading Big Sur by Kerouac, and I think Dharma Bums is probably my favorite story. I'm not much of a writer, so I found myself looking a lot at Kerouac's voice hoping to find a role model for myself. For any of you guys who hasn't read much of it, he's got the most beautiful mix of stream of conscious and information, and I'd recommend it with all my heart.

Once text was matched to the images, the main design decision I had left was how to put the text into the pages. This was a major part of my focus paper in the beginning and I had to put a lot of thought into it. The art of David Mack was a major influence when thinking of this. One of the techniques he uses is to just cut out strips of text and put them right amongst the images. I thought this was a brilliant idea, so I decided to stand on the shoulders of giants and just steal it.

During Exams at the end of January, I listened to more this american life than I have in my entire life and got all 32 pages of sketches finished up. Here they are, dads.

hepyeargh.

working with palettes, yeargh

For anyone who's been reading this, (I'm looking at you, diaz and isabella) y'all know that last week or two weeks ago or something I was having major color worries. Not so much that I thought that I couldn't get my stuff together ever to do it, but it just took a lot of analysis to really figure out what I was trying to do.

The main thing was that I had all these separate visions of the two worlds that existed, outside and in the woods, that sometimes conflicted with each other.

After looking at some of my favorite paintings by Ashley Wood and James Jean, I finally realized that if just set up color rules for myself that stayed constant, it'd be so much easier for me to start jumping into paintings without worry.

The first one I gave a shot was the field and outdoor palette, based a lot on this image by james jean (who, by the way, apparently just updated his site! how exciting!) I didn't want the total, almost monochromatic feel of it, but the way that the gold is almost overpowering seemed to have something I was going for.

The next one I worked on was the in the woods palette. This was based mostly on my own picturing of the woods. It's probably a little more naturalistic and true to life than the other. I haven't decided yet if I want it to be dreamier than that, or what, but maybe I can just achieve that using glow-y light. "Nymphs and Satyr" by Bougareau takes a really nice look at executing that approach because it's technically in the woods, they all should be in shadow, but the light from the other world can still descend down. The juxtaposition of these two world gives you a lot of possibility to focus on certain compositional elements and even make certain symbolic implications while doing that.

Anyway, so I think all that stuff is good. In other news, I did a quick poll on my facebook on who would be interested in buying this book and have a list of almost 40 people now that I know would like it! holy crap! I thought I wouldn't make it to 25. Guess I'm doing alright.

Blast from the past #2 in a little bit, i think.

hepyeargh, we got characters all over the place

Meet the gang, everyone.

After countless sketches using faceless figures vaguely making random gestures, I've finally got faces matched to personalities.

The only real time I've seen that sort of thing done is when my friend Geoff created a small comic book at RISD.

I learned a lot from this whole process. I found myself trying to look at each character and to express their personalities through their facial features and clothing/hair styles.

The first one I started with was Gen just because with him as the narrator's voice makes me feel a little closer to him. In the plot of the story, Gen is kindof in love with Kai, in a boyish way, but in the end, he's more comfortable living the neolithic life style. The sense of security and habit gives him comfort. So even though he's living out there in the woods, I wanted to give him something that was a little more linked to the "suburban lifestyle:" the button down shirt. His hair I didn't want too crazy either, to fit those same ideas.

Kai was kind of the anti that, so instead, I wanted him to just have the unhindered t-shirt and the semi dread hawk hair.

These were important decisions, but I found the one where I was really trying to be deliberate was in Oliana. Unlike Kai and Gen, her voice isn't heard that much except for when she asks Kai why he's leaving, so it's really important that her personality get expressed through her appearance and her actions. So in this, I ended up thinking about her hair a lot. I wanted her to be in touch with her feminine side, but, also, obviously, she lives in the woods, so she had to show a bit of tom boyness in it. The result is that kind of long, but tied up look. Same sort of thing went for her tank top.

The whole process was new to me, and I realized I have some issues with anatomy of the female torso. I guess I'm just used to seeing my own sort of frame in the mirror, but I think figuring out the size of the shoulders/rib cage is a whole different process between the genders. Hep. whatever.

blast from the past #1

I want to start making a step by step documentation of everything i've done since the beginning of this whole thing, starting way back in august. Come May, I've gotta walk out and do a presentation of everything I've done during this whole creation process, so I figure that if I'm gonna do that, I gotta take some action so I don't collapse into a dribbling puddle of drool and stuttering "uhm"'s in front of everyone.

So lets all jump in the magic school bus, gang, or the delorean, or what have you (did you know that the original deloreans' speedometers only actually went up to 85? WE'RE NEVER GONNA MAKE IT BACK TO THE FUTURE NOW.)


So sometime midaugust in the dreadful lull between my summer job and the beginning of school, desperately trying to convince myself that there's still plenty of time to have fun in the sun, I got dragged along on a family vacation. That means a whole lotta nothing, because my family is the kind that loves to wake up, go to the beach, sit on the beach, and then go back to bed. This means a lot of time to doodle in your sketchbook and read. The book that I brought at the request of Ms. Diaz was by Reif Larsen and called The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet. It's this super cool story about a prodigy cartographer by the name of Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet. T.S.'s mentor has sent off one of his insect illustrations to the Smithsonian, and its won an award. The next hundred or so pages are about his journey from his ranch in Montana to the D.C.; hopping trains, hitching rides, taking whatever he can get to get there. While the sense of wanderlust that exists in the content of the book would later get reflected in the sketches that spawned Pine Bark Kids, the really interesting part that spawned this idea of challenging the boundaries of illustrated stories lies in the margins of the pages.

Each and every page margin has an illustration in a very analytical, cartographic style; made as if T.S. had been doodling in the corners of this novel. This book is absolutely a novel, there's no questioning that, but there's something more than that. Does that make it a graphic novel? Not really. The graphic novel has become defined as what the Neil Gaimans, the Frank Millers, the Art Spiegelman's of the world make. Masterpieces, yeah, but locked down into what the page format of the comic book has become expected to be.

The problem was that there was no ground for stories to be somewhere between the comic book pages where more than half of the information lies in the images and novel pages, where one can use narrative text at great lengths to let the reader paint the picture in his/her own head. The answer I came up with was the illustrated novel. It's a novel that takes cues from children's books. The image is there to set the tone of the setting, but the action and descriptors lie in the text.

So there I was that summer, reading all this story about jumping on freight trains and packing your leatherman and hitching a ride with a truck driver. There was so much time to kill while my family soaked up the sun, so by the end of the trip, I had about 15 really rendered/watercolored pages in my sketchbook. Without even really thinking about what I was drawing, first some trees appeared, with a portrait of a boy next to them. Then his hat had a tree on it. It kept building, and suddenly I had 4-5 pages of bears and trees and boys and girls.

There wasn't that much thought of a full story that came with it, more just of a general concept of this dynamic between two boys and a girl in the woods, and how they live.

Next up came the short story that I wrote in December. The text itself is probably the perfect manifestation of mediocre, so I'll spare you and summarize it point by point.

Pine Bark Kids, First Draft.

1. Three kids are walking behind the local grocery store, following directions to the big tree to find the train track.
2. The three have a great time with the wind in their hair.
3. One of them starts seeing this weird buffalo faced guy. Unclear. Hmph.
4. The rest of the gang are all, "huh?"
5. The first one starts disappearing more and more.
6. Finally, one morning (after weeks, or something) he disappears for good.
7. The other two continue on their journey.
8. THE END.

So somehow that entire story fit into all of 4 or 5 pages. Needless to say, it was so shallow and lacking of charm that it wasn't much longer than what I listed above.

But!

It was really important, because that first step of getting the general idea of what exactly is happening between these three kids was pulled out from just those random sketchbook doodles. So as mediocre as it was, it was a crucial step.

The next step from this (covered in BLAST FROM THE PAST #2 BR0) was to hack and chop, and put a magnifying glass on those little scenes to make it something that could actually hold someones interest. So, Good. I got that bit down. Once I get up to #3 I think, I'll have gotten to the point where I can put up a link to the sketches, where the design parts get really interesting. Hep!

colorz, dad!

So, I got a lot further into the whole painting process this week. In total, I've pretty much laid down the underpaintings/general blocks of color for 6 or 7 of the spreads and got finally LEGIT character development sheets set up.

And now for a special message directed at color: you're killing me, brah!

I've been keeping that James Jean painting in mind and been thinking of how I decided to give some sort of rust-ish cast on the open sun areas and a ghostlier green cast on the stuff under trees, but it seems impossible to get all of it to fit together. To try and get a hold on different ideas of palettes that are interesting to me, I've been looking at as many paintings as I can.



This is a piece by Claude Monet, a piece of a series of paintings of the same Rouen Cathedral with tons of different approaches to depicting light. Googling "Monet Cathedral" will give you an idea of what I'm talking about. Nothing was different about these paintings except for his palette and the light. I think there's something really untouchable here that could fit in with what I want to try and make. In a similar vain (albeit in a more contemporary style), Sam Weber has hit on some of these ideas in his illustrated version of Lord of the Flies.



Now, in the day, this is all well and good, but the question is if this low contrast, fogged over style of rendering looks cohesive with the night scene that really needs to be high contrast to be effective? I guess I'll figure out soon enough.

Character sketches are coming soon (as soon as the snow stops falling long enough for me to get to school to bring them back home, sheesh y'all.)

scott mccloud on comics

I've read most of his book Understanding Comics, but seeing him talk through it really gets you. So definitely check out between 7:40 and 10:45.

let's start paintin', dads!

This Monday was the first time that I got to pull out the paints and begin to see what direction the aesthetics of each page was going to be. The first page I started painting was page 4-5 because I figured the large area of tall grass that was depicted would give me the opportunity to work on my textures and to see how smooth I wanted to paint something that was made up of millions of single pieces. From the feedback I received from my mentor, Chelsea, I decided that I wanted to depict things in a way that retained a certain lack of information. We thought that there was something special in the way the sketches held this quality of rendering that was worth looking for.


Based on this decision, I decided to get a rough sketch of what was going on onto the final Bristol pieces without trying too hard to get every detail mapped out. This ended up being a bit of a mistake. This first go at painting gave me a good chance to look at what sort of palette I wanted to keep consistent throughout the story. I began thinking that I would be using something pretty realistic to life, but as I began a few other paintings, my thoughts began to shift.


While imagining body contortions and painting styles, I’ve been looking often at the figure studies and paintings of James Jean found in his book Kindling. Jean is a graduate from the School of Visual Arts in New York City, and has been working in the illustration world since 2001. His quality of rendering and his accuracy of figure studies have made him an important point of inspiration. Additionally, his use of layering is on point to the sort of things I hope to achieve.

After starting with more true to life colors, analysis of Jean’s paintings revealed to me the power of subtle shots of color amongst monotone. In pieces such as Swan, the use of a slight yellow pulling through the flowers pops out from the really desaturated rest of the painting, despite the fact that the yellow is not that vibrant. This made me decide that I should make the fields and mountains hold a red/gold overcast while the land sheltered by the trees could have a ghostly green overcast. I think this is gonna give my pages a nicer general feel, and will hopefully make the pages feel more cohesive together in the end.

A lot of painting is gonna start going on this week, so I'll start taking photos of a couple paintings as they develop to show the process.