Exercises in style

Last week we had Matt Madden, comic book artist and teacher, in a style workshop.

Monday we did a "template comic" with six panels from the simple script:

1. Student A working on comic in classroom
2. Enter student B
3. Student B sits down next to student A
4. Student A slides his/her comic to student B
5. Student A: "She's all yours"
6. Student A leaves, student B starts drawing

Here's my template comic, that I am not particularly proud of:

The rest of the week we redid the page with different constraints.

Monday. First constraint was genre, and I got adventure, and made a terribly ugly comic:

Tuesday. Next constraint was to redo the framing and point of view out from a certain principle. I chose to only use extreme close-ups and I added sound effects. My choice was pretty random and the easy way out, and my comic ended up pretty boring:

 

 

Wednesday. Third constraint was to choose the style of another artist and apply this to the template comic. I chose the style of amazing Lilli Carré (www.lillicarre.com) who I have fallen completely in love with. This was the most successful product I did this week even though I didn't stay very close to the template. I learned a lot from copying her:

 

 

But the texting is pretty bad.

 

 

 

Thursday. We watched Jørgen Leths "The Perfect Human" and "The five Obstructions" and used the principle of the latter to do the last comic page. We had to make three to five obstructions for another student in the class, and then make our comic using the obstructions.

I got obstructions from Eydi, who gave me

1: Drawing style should be the one of Jeffrey Brown's "Every girl is the end of the world to me"

2: Backgrounds in perspective

3: Dynamic

4: Page should be 50 % black.

 

Very mean. But it ended up... acceptable:

 

 

 

 

 

It has been an amazing week with really interesting lectures about constrained writing and how to apply these principles to comics, although I have not had my best week in terms of successful products.

Luckily Matt is probably coming back next semester for a couple of weeks, to teach us together with his wife Jessica Abel, who is also a comic artist and teacher.

 

 

 

And today I made my very first GIF!!!

 

I am not proud. But it was fun.