Lin Trips, week 1.

Brief:

Over the course of the year, while not in a placement, I am planning to create a webcomic based on stories I heard or happen to me.

I plan to create this webcomic by collecting from memories or talking to my family about theirs to form the short narratives. I plan to publish these on Webtoon, a platform for self-published comics, which is easily accessible both in the UK and outside.

My webcomic will be in a Tim Burton’s style mixed with my own as I believe this will make the webcomic peculiar enough to be noticed and will also represent me as a person and push my art skills further as I usually not use this style of drawing for projects. The artwork will be both created digitally and analogue as I believe some of the markings/colours are beautiful and fit the art style well, and will be advantaged by the digital work, I would also like to experiment further to decide the ratio between the two.

Finally, my audience will be around 13 years old onward, these stories will not contain swears and will only be funny experiences but, knowing my tendency to be quite serious sometimes, I decided it will might not be relatable or appropriate for younger audiences.

For this project I used my old research and character design I used for my Thematic Projects: Migration as Graphic Narratives. The reasoning behind this choice is that the old project revolved around the experience of my family moving to England, and the project I am going to do is also about experiences and stories. I thought it would have been nice to re-use my old artwork and improve it as I did rush the old project quite a lot and I didn’t give them enough thought and care. Another reason was that my sister and mum liked the characters and it was a shame to just throw them away, and I was quite happy with my character.

Here is the old research:

I had this idea around my head for the last part of the summer break and I created these out of boredom.

I used these to create these:

These are the reasons why I didn’t do much experimenting with my own character design as I did quite a lot already.

For my sister’s character it was more complicated as I wanted to make her avatar better than the one I made for her a couple of months ago. The first few where horrible so I decided to stop, I looked at Tim Burton’s work and created two sheets of paper filled with the artist’s work. I also own this cool little book called ‘Things you think about in a bar’ by Tim Burton which was able to get me back on track with the artwork. To be honest it was weird, looking at the book made my brain ‘reset’ and look at the hole process differently and start again. I guess my brain always wants me to have the perfect design immediately and forgets to have fun and these are just sketches to work on and make perfect later, or to stop worrying so much as this does impact immensely on how I draw and how I see my drawings. When I was reminded of these important notions my artwork begun to be decent again.

Like I did before I pulled out the best of the experiments I’ve done and I put them in distinct and presentable manner, but these are still sketching

The same problem arises when it was time for my mum’s character: I hated how she looked like in the old project, it was horrible and I wanted something better, but once again I was stumped because I wanted to make it better but I didn’t know how. Then I remembered that I was inspired by Toothless from How To Train Your Dragon a lot while design it so I thought I would once again create two sheet of paper filled with relevant pictures, it didn’t work out as well as I wanted because finding pictures and avoid legal troubles left me with very few samples to work with. So I though that the way the Night Fury moved and acted looked much like a mixture between a cat and reptile, so I began to look for cat pictures to ‘upgrade’ the design. I still got a lot of problems with the sketches as they tend to have a big head, or a small little head that stuck out like a pimple.

Then once again the book I mentioned before come to my rescue, as I wanted to incorporate Tim Burton’s style inside my own to make it more unique, I begun to sketch these out.

To be honest I really like this and made me a bit more aware on how cat’s legs fold and maybe how to draw them, but it also made a character representing my mum a bit too creepy and threatening than she actually is, but I couldn’t keep it out of my head. Looking at the sketches inside the book I also noticed how his sketches showed cats like round and puffy, so I tried it, but I find them unsettling even more than the one before.

As I was once again stuck not knowing what to do, I decided to go and ask my mum about her own opinion (like I should have done in the first place); she pointed out that she didn’t like how the standing dragon looked like, nor the round dragon, but she was fond of the first dragon’s I made, the one with the big head. With this in mind, I begun to sketch out a way to make that sketch a bit more presentable.

I began to regroup them again, like I did before but I believe I didn’t do a good job with this like I did with mine and Cass’ so I will need to practice my mum’s character much better. Also, she didn’t like how the third dragon would move and she is happy that the other two would move like a cat.

With these I went and gave the options to my sister and mum of which design they wanted and asked for feedback for which one I should use. So now I have the ‘final’ ones.

The next step was to create the title design.

My sister likes the blue paper tape design quite a lot and I have to agree it has a nice design to it, counting I do like to experiment a lot and the theme of the project is about me being extremely clumsy and all the funny stories that comes out of that. But I am still uncertain, and I believe I need a bit more time to reflect and experiment to find the right type and design.

While thinking of what to do with the title I begun to sketch really quickly emotions of the characters, something I forgot how important it is. This is still ongoing and not finished.

The next steps:

Next week I need to collect stories that will be put into my comic and create the artwork for them, The important thing is me having my own character ready to use as the Intro needs to be ready for the end of next week and in it only my character will appear.