In The Studio

I'm having a bit of a colouring meltdown at the moment. My attempts at colouring my comics in the past have been decidedly mixed, so I'm trying to make a little bit more of a concerted effort to use colour rather than just hobbling myself by constantly sticking to black and white. Of course, it's not coming easy. 


Part of the problem is that I don't really know where or what materials I want to focus on, so I'm experimenting with a couple of different approaches. This is something of a double-edged sword, because lacking that specificity can turn you into something of a jack-of-all. For the moment, however, I'm taking a break from the painfully slow world of computer colouring and focusing more on traditional materials. 

I was given a gorgeous set of Acrylic Inks some time ago and have only really gotten around to trying them out. The colours are incredibly luminous and strong; they layer really nicely too, and you can get a good variety of tones. The downsides are that it takes time to build up more nuanced, muted colours, especially if you're using thin washes like I am. Of course, applying thin wash after thin wash is just one way of using inks as a medium, and preferably I'd like to slap it on a bit thicker, and be bolder with my colour schemes. I'm hoping I can get a load of glass phials and start mixing up colours for some Herge-style colouring experiments! Does anyone know anywhere that might sell such a thing? 

 

Time consuming though it may be, I think I'll be colouring the bulk of Nineteen-Ough-Two like this. If anyone has any good tips or tutorials, then I'd love to hear them! Keep me posted, 

Elliot x

More News from the Studio

Work on Nineteen-Ough-Two is coming on apace, and it looks like I should have the strip inked by early next week! A lot of my time so far has been concerned with Historical research, which is always time consuming, slow, but ultimately very rewarding. I've found some great old photos to work with. Whilst on a search for old costumes to use for bystanders in the "1902" segment of the narrative, I came across this great turn-of-the-century portrait:

Dude! Cecil Higgins, you dandy gentleman, where have you been all my life? That spotted 'kerchief, that dapper watch fob, those lush curled moustache tips! Cecil may have to find a home in one of my other stories, because he is simply a Cartoon character made flesh. I am working fairly flat out on Nineteen-Ough-Two this week, but if I have a spare hour, I may break off to sketch up a my own portrait of Cecil. At times like this, I feel that good image research really pays off; every now and again, divine providence throws something like this in your lap, but it's not something you want to be relying on all the time. 


Anyway, enough rambling, here's another very quick "raw" scan to let you see how everything's coming along: 

Blank spaces in panels 3-6 are where the "1902 AD" logo will be copy-pasted. Of all the tools an artist can use in the digital world, copy-paste is probably the lowest, the cheapest, most miserable attempt to bulk out work, so i've tried to keep it to an absolute minimum. I'm also justifying it by reminding myself that all these panels will be coloured individually. In fact, a lot of the narrative will be told through colour.

In case you hadn't guessed, repetition is going to be a key theme in the visuals of Nineteen-Ough-Two (hence title) and this approach is what's allowed the whole thing to come together so swiftly. However, I always feel that true repetition in art is boring for everyone involved, which is why I've tried to vary the seemingly repetitive panels as much as possible. More often than not, true repetition can end up creating works that are as dull for the reader as they are masochistically tedious for the artist to produce. Successful art in this genre usually ends up relying on the sheer spectacle of scale and the baffling pointlessness and insanity of the exercise to impress. In the comic form it's very difficult to tell a narrative with truly identical panels; not only because nothing "happens" as such, but also because it doesn't capture the reader's eye in any way; you'll tend to skim the entirety, like you would a fabric pattern, rather than pausing and considering each individual panel. That's not to say that audience reaction isn't a useful tool in it's own right! See Tim Kreider's masterful We Even Yet? as an example of how this glib visual attitude can be used to evoke a powerful reaction from the reader.  

The only other Wimbledon news is that a Tutor's asked me to exhibit some pages in a small college exhibition, so you could see some of these coloured sooner than I anticipated. Until then, have a great weekend, everybody! 

Elliot x

In the Studio

Hey Guys! Just thought I'd give you a quick update as to what's been going on at my studio HQ at Wimbledon! Things are pretty busy this week, as I've been trying to draw a new comic! Nineteen-Ough-Two is my first attempt at making a long-format scroll comic; it' also completely silent and follows the life of a Cornicestone through a century of London History.

 But that's not all! When it's complete, I'll be attempting the impossible and trying to turn this full colour comic into a limited edition screenprint! Since it's going to be about 28x300cm this could be a bit of a trick to pull off, we'll have to see how it goes. But it's also going to be pretty costly; and due to the amounts of ink, paper, and time that need to be devoted to it, I don't think it's really going to be an affordable comic; so Nineteen-Ough-Two will also be available online as a scrolling digital comic.

This comic's also a bit of a new direction for me in that I'm strictly limiting the tools I work with. I enjoy brush painting with inks, but the whole process can be very time-consuming, and makes me obsess relentlessly over wether I'm making the "right" lines. Nineteen-Ough-Two is my first real attempt to adress this issue; all the artwork is drawn with fims fixed gauge pens that don't allow for any variation in the width of the lines, and the colour will be carrying the story for the most part. The upshot of using a very inflexible nib when inking is that you end up thinking less about the inking process itself and concentrating more on how you use these largely identical marks to draw a variety of different forms, textures and objects. In short, it's great for practicing your markmaking skills without a lot of other hassle.

Here's a little taster to whet your appetite!

 

Check back later in the week for more updates! 

Until then, 

Elliot x

A Bad Start/ Mission Statement

This is a short comic I made recently for my application to the London Print Studio's internship programme. The application involved "explain[ing] in words and pictures why you're interested in comics", so this is kinda like a Mission Statement about my attitude to comics. 

Overall, I think it came out fairly well. I wanted to talk about Frederic Wertham and the Comics Code in a way that would distribute the blame not only to Wertham but to those who stayed silent and allowed the Comics Code to be put into effect. The fact that this was one of the most draconian and strictest censorship acts ever put into effect in Modern Western Society is an affront; than the fact that it inspired very little reaction from the artistic community is inexcusable. 

I wanted to point out that the reaction against that "Seduction of the Innocent" inspired was very much an extension of prejudices that were endemic to High Modernism as a movement in all forms of art at the time. In an era in which defining the "essential nature" of all forms of art (but most notably painting) was the most pertinent issue, synaesthetic art forms such as Comics were slighted for mangling two "noble" arts into a bastard offspring. In addition to these prejudices,  Modernism also encouraged highly elitist divides between "High" art and "Low" art, with Low art often hazily defined as Mass Media. To put it another way, a single, unique abstract painting laboured upon by the artist was the polar opposite of a run of  10,000 Comic Books produced by machine. 

In many ways, Modernism was an extended reaction to and rebellion against Mechanical Reproduction, and to my mind, the Wertham furor was an inevitable vengeful backlash. My one regret with regards to this comic is that for reasons of brevity I've dramatised the libricidic aspects of Wetham's campaign that have captured public imagination for decades. The truly harmful aspects of the American Campaign against Comic Books were the establishment of the Comics Code Authority. The Code was an authority that deftly evaded some serious 1st Amendment infringements by being a de jure "voluntary" certification, but imposed a monopoly on the Comic Book marketplace to such an extent that it became a de facto censorship body.  The Code stifled creativity, bankrupted competitors and allowed Marvel and DC to grab insane amounts of market shares, becoming in effect the only publishers on the market place. And, of course, it inflicted untold damage on the artists themselves. Wether or not Comics were art before the Code is a debatable point; the fact that they weren't after it is beyond any reasonable doubt. Any Comic published under the CCA logo is nothing more than a product. 

I've touched on some huge issues here in not nearly enough detail to do them justice. You can expect more from me in the future about Wertham, the CCA and the relation between Comics and Modernism.

Note to Art Fans; That's my facsimile of Sir John Everett Millias' Ophelia in panel 3 of page 2; my decision to actually Illustrate Ophelia's death on page 3 raises a great deal of questions about the relationship between Comics, Literature and Art. By illustrating Ophelia's death directly, do I destroy the ambiguity that is the most compelling aspect of her demise, etc? Discuss.