PROJECT 1: COMICS AND ZINES
Tasked with creating a comic based around the nursery rhyme There was an Old Woman, within our pair we mutually decided to approach the project from a darker angle; specifically exploring the themes of poverty and desperation following the bleak and quite brutal final lines of the poem.
ASHLEY WOOD
Having explored Wood’s use of coloured monotone and hazy, muted texture in order to create a sombre atmosphere, it became an apparently appropriate aspect to include in our own work, especially juxtaposed by the sharper, jagged line of the black and whites, and how she overreaches the frame, as it gives a messy, chaotic sense to the piece.
SAM KEITH
Keith’s use of solid blacks and largely muted palettes creates a very stark difference in tone that provides emphasis of depth. This is particularly interesting in creating focal points, and he utilises it to force bizarre shapes and perspectives – something we wanted to take inspiration from within our own work.
Analysing the poem we pulled out the primary themes of poverty and claustrophobia, aiming for a modern twist we then decided that this could be explored through the lens of homelessness.
Following this I began experimenting with character designs within this theme, attempting to utilise outfits and body language to communicate across the setting we were looking for. At this point my teammate did similarly, experimenting with style and design to identify how we could portray a sombre atmosphere and overarching sense of misery that the poem captures.
I experimented varying between cartoon and more realistic styles.
THUMBNAILS
We discussed the ways in which the comic could come together compositionally and sketched these out as thumbnails, altering and playing around with ideas that we liked to gauge how visually effective they were.
As the poem presents a core theme of claustrophobia, we were keen to experiment with unusual panel shapes and manipulated perspective to inspire a sense of that.
Taking the panel ideas we thought most effective, I sketched out an elaborated version to see how they would fit together within the structure of a comic and identify if there was anything that would need changing.
The main changes made were those to the composition and perspective of the final panel pictured: the addition of small details and altercation to the perspective of the woman kneeling.
I then moved on to the final line art, fleshing out the panels on A4. I used watered down ink to achieve the mid tones for the washed-out, gritty atmosphere we were looking to create.
I made a mistake in dropping ink on the first panel, so scanned in and digitally removed it. However I was unhappy with the boldness of the second scan so we chose to stick with the original sheet.
FINISHED INKS AND COLOURING
My teammate coloured and inked the pages. We decided to stick to a largely monochromatic colour scheme, using only red ink to contrast and pop against the black in a similar way to that of one of our initial inspirations; Sam Keith’s Sandman.