I write this learning log after one of the most frustrating sections of my OCA studies. My assignment will be almost two months late. During the interim time, I have been suffering from what can only be described as burnout. External pressures and commitments have absolutely drained me, and it has unfortunately taken all of the joy out of this part of the module. Trying to work when the joy leaves is something I have not had to contend with before. I have suffered, and managed, my mental health through my studies - but having to persevere with an assignment when all interest has left me and with no energy to spare is a circumstance that has been difficult to overcome.
I started the assignment by brainstorming ideas under the four prompted titles:
‘City Story’
’On a Journey’
‘A chance encounter’
‘The Big Event’
It took me ages to come up with any kind of story; I really, really struggled. I couldn’t come up with a single good idea.
I remembered the adage "write what you know". Drawing on personal memories I came up with a story to fulfil the ‘On a Journey’ premise. Using Dan Harman‘s Story Circle model I structured the story and broke down each page into an overview that I could turn into panels. I was pretty satisfied that I could then turn this into a full story through thumbnails and scripting. I checked my courseware to see if there was anything else I needed to cover. That’s when I saw it - reading the instructions it was clear to me that the assignment only wanted one page.
There was no way that I could properly tell my story over a single page! I didn’t know what to do. I took a few days away from coursework to invest my time in other pursuits and clear my head. When I came back to my work, I first started by trying to find references of 1-page storytelling to help me with ideas. I then remembered my days reading the Beano, Dandy, Buster and other comics in the 1980s. In those volumes, they would frequently have to tell stories on a single page. I didn’t have any of my old annuals to hand, but luckily my son has become an avid Beano and Phoenix reader. Looking through some of his past issues, I got an idea of how they told their stories.
The current Beano’s rear-page feature lets readers become a Beano character [1]. This inspired me to again re-visit personal experiences and to concentrate on writing what I knew. A flippant idea came into my head to write the story about the very recent experience of making a mistake reading the brief. I started by making thumbnails to see if the story would play out on a single page, using a format similar to the comics that I used to read, but keeping with the 9-panel structure.
Now content that this story might actually have some legs, I refined the thumbnails into some pencilled roughs, using the space to think about the text. I realised that the pacing of the story didn’t quite work and there needed to be a beat between the eighth and final panels to make the story work. So I decided to combine the title in the first panel with the second scene-setting panel. I had made the scene-setter 2-panels wide after watching some interesting dissections of the 9-panel format on the Strip Panel Naked [4-6] YouTube channel. This new layout allowed me to insert the extra panel as panel eight and the pacing worked a lot better as I had hoped.
Next, I needed to make more refined pencils. I struggled for days (again) by being sucked into a whirlpool of worrying about style, what my style was and what I wanted it to be more like. I did a lot of work referencing images that spoke to me and tried to analyse what about the images spoke to me. I also spent a good deal of time using my sketchbook to try exercises of turning shapes into faces and playing around with exaggeration to push me out of the habit of trying to depict things too realistically. I also experimented with a painterly and collage approach to a picture of The Joker to try and emulate a more extreme style like Dave McKean from my previous research.
However, as much as I was trying to take a constructive approach to solve this problem, all I felt was increasing levels of anxiety. So I decided to just start something. Given the time issues I had, I decided to try and do all of the next parts digitally. So using the roughs, I created a set of pencils. Given I was the main character of this story I used photos as reference to help me with expressions and poses. I noticed that panel eight in my roughs wasn’t serving the natural flow of the story, so I flipped the panel horizontally, with the arms facing the right and helping to draw the reader’s eye to the final panel.
After the pencils, I started to ink digitally on a new layer. I used the pencils quite closely and started to make good progress. By the time that I reached the fourth panel I had started to get "into the zone" and realised that, in letting go of all my busy thoughts, I was starting to play and have fun inking details. Looking back at the first three panels I realised that they were more like tracing, and felt a little wooden. I didn’t like the inking style and I realised that I was falling back into my usual trap of trying to be too realistic. So I decided to start again with my inks, but this time keeping the energy I had started to channel with the third panel.
The new inks were rougher, but I enjoyed putting more energy into them. It gave me more courage to take risks and experiment. Remembering my research I experimented with adding in little touches of goofy humour. I tried to be more brace with spotting blacks and used halftones to add in a shading. The more I worked, the more fun I started to have. I was happy with where the inks were at and moved onto adding colours.
I started by adding in ‘flats’ - these are normally used to block areas of colour that can be isolated as part of the colouring process. In the past, I have coloured comics in a relatively current and mainstream way. I prefer to do these using layers of curves adjustments so that I can shade and highlight non-destructively. But when I went to start colouring, I decided to choose only flat colours - given that I had shaded with halftones as part of the inking process and to tap into the colouring styles of the Beano and Dandy of my youth. I also added in the text, based on the story I had written in my roughs. Now that I had rendered ink images I could tweak how my text was placed and chose to alter the variety of captions, thought and speech bubbles. I created custom bubbles to better learn from my earlier exercises and optimise the space around the text. I chose a fairly traditional comic font and used emphasised words fairly conventionally to denote intonation. On the flats, I removed the colours and left white where the speech bubbles and captions would be to allow proper separation of inks and background.
Now that I had a finished comic, I reviewed where I had reached in my process. The flat colours that I had used definitely had the saturated colourful feeling that I wanted, but at the same time, they felt more like pop art than properly retro. I noticed in Tank Girl Forever that they had used different techniques to make the comic look old and yet contemporary at the same time.
So I decided to try and achieve a similar effect with my piece. I used a number of post-effects, layers textures and filters to adjust the page, tweaking and adjusting the layers until I was happy with the effect. One of the things that I enjoyed doing was s the registration errors of printing. I found that when done with intention, these can actually be used to add additional effects that can help the image.
Given everything I have gone through to get through this assignment, I am actually pretty happy with the results. On reflection part of the secret was to stop caring. When I stopped I let go and just tried stuff out without as much regard to the final result. I really like the little goofy elements and I am also pleased with how the page reads even without text which I think shows that my storytelling is improving. And the original story I came up with? I still think it’s a good potential story, so I will keep it on file and perhaps I can make use of it later in the course. Most of all, I am just relieved that this part is finished and I can move on!
References
Auchterlounie, N. and Emerson, H., 2021. Cannonball Cal. The Beano, p.Rear Cover.
Martin, A. and Parson, B., 2020. The wonderful world of Tank Girl. 1st ed. London: Titan Comics, p.41.
Northfield, G., 2021. The Lovely Pirates. The Phoenix, (487), p.11.
Strip Panel Naked, 2016. The 9-Panel Grid | The Omega Men (2016). [video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQzXcFmf98I [Accessed 26 May 2021].
Strip Panel Naked, 2018. David Aja's 9 Panel Grid Approach. [video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cm_T82EMjBw [Accessed 26 May 2021].
Strip Panel Naked, 2020. From Hell's 9 Panel Grid. [video] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o12GA4pGMUo [Accessed 26 May 2021].
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