Exercise
For the first part of this exercise, I had to create a 2-panel strip from 2, 12cm squares. These squares were meant to depict an event, only showing the start and end of that event - a 'before and after', you might say.
Whilst there were a few obvious choices to do this exercise quickly, I decided to keep with my learned process, and took to my sketchbook. I used it to mind-map ideas, and play around with some options.
After sleeping on the options I wrote down, I finally chose to try the 'Film Noir' option, so I could play some more with ink and shadow and see if I could achieve a sense of suspense. I used my sketchbook to play with some options for angle and composition for the first panel. One of the options seemed to be a good option to adapt for the second panel too.
Once I had an idea about what I wanted to achieve from my thumbnails, I started with the pencils of the exercise. I found spotting the blacks extremely difficult, and I think I could benefit from doing some studies on lighting (particularly faces) and high perspectives. My plan is to do some of these in my sketchbook so that I can be more comfortable with where to use shadows.
I started by lining in with black ink using my fountain pen, then used a black brush pen to fill in and add shadows, I tried to feather some of them, but my results were a bit sporadic. The end result was definitely acceptable for the exercise, however, so I erased any visible pencil lines and scanned in the panels. I made the blacks more congruent and cleaned up the whites too by adjusting the levels.
This exercise turned out to be more challenging than I thought on first glance, and it has opened a number of areas that I need to work on as I go through the module.
Research
The second part of this exercise was to review three historical examples of 2-panel sequential illustrations, pick one and analyse and makes notes about the story being told. I chose the second image:
In the first frame, we see a man revelling with alcohol and food. He is in the company of other men which suggests revelry. Port and sherry are clearly labelled on the bottles on the table, and the man's glass also has two tones, mirroring the colours used for the spirits. Does this suggest he's drinking both at once? He's clearly drunk quite a lot already judging by the red tip of his nose and slouching posture.
In the second frame, we see (presumably) the same man looking very worse for wair in bed. He is being attacked by two imps, one with hammers hitting the man's head, the other with a poker poking his belly. Each of the imps has the same labels as attached to the bottles in frame one, suggesting they represent the two spirits.
It seems that the imps are a metaphor for a hangover, leading the viewer to fill in the missing time with the logical assumption that the revelry continued throughout the night (the clock in the first frame is gone past 10 o'clock). However, given the symbology and content, the pair of frames could also be taken as a metaphor and warning against excess.
This allows the image to tread combined paths of humour, satire and fable. It's not designed to be too serious or scary, but perhaps that is intentional to help gets its message across.
References
Robert, S., 2016. Night And Morning. [image] Available at: https://swongs1126.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/night-and-morning.jpg [Accessed 31 December 2020].
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