Following on from Exercise 3.4, this time I was taking text and creating images from it. However this time the text was going to be song lyrics. I also was not going to use any of the lyrics as words in the strip, only imagery to convey content, movement and sense of place.
First I spent a long time going through different songs I like to select one for this exercise. I wanted it to have the right amount of imagery, but it also needed to be able to fill up four pages of a hypothetical comic.
I first created a list of potentials which grew over the evenings that I had time to properly sit and listen to the music. I took advantage of lyrics sites to read the lyrics at the same time as listening so I could get a full sense of the mental imagery. After I had made my list I assessed the viability of each of my options.
In the end, I opted for a song called "Iron" by an artist known as Woodkid.
I printed out the lyrics and then started to break down the text as directed by the exercise. I started by circling words or phrases with strong imagery, followed by making notes of the mood, weather, season and tone of the song's lyrics and music. I was listening to the song on repeat by this point, letting it seep into my brain as I dissected and sectioned the lyrics into chunks.
I used those chunks to envision where I might want to make sequences of panels. I also thought about how the lyrics made me think about colour, and how that colour might change through the song. I had ideas coming into my head that started to give the song a narrative, but I thought that these notes were not enough for me to translate into images yet.
So I used my sketchbook further to take apart the sections that I had identified, and then for each 'phrase' of the story, I wrote a small descriptive block of writing - a little bit like a 'Marvel-way' script.
This allowed me to mentally map out a full story, almost like a music video. I tried to get a sense of the rhythm of the story and made notes where I thought a page end might be, so to pace the story as well as make good use of things like the page turn.
The next thing I wanted to do was get a sense of the colours and stylistic approach that I wanted to take. There were aspects that I wanted to try in my work:
Getting better at using brushes for inking
Use blacks more confidently
Experiment with high contrast
I also had been very taken with the opening credits sequence for a new show on TV called The Flight Attendant. The sequence used very saturated colours with a very graphic sensibility. Figures are often in silhouette, and it reminded me a lot of the Sin City comics in a lot of regards.
I created a number of swatches to work out which version of the colours I had identified at the research stage would work best in the sequence. After experimenting with a number of options I chose indigo and a red-orange hue from one of my watercolour sets.
I also created a small mood board to give myself some visual inspiration and constraint when putting together the final sequence.
The next part was to start putting the sequence together. I was only able to do 3-6 panels, so working out what to select from the whole story I had written was tough.
Initially, I planned to do the first section, talking about the ocean and spent a good amount of time doing visual research for depicting an underwater scene.
However, by the time I got to my thumbnails, I realised that this sequence was likely not going to work by itself. When viewed alone it lacked the necessary context without going well over the six-panel limit. So I decided to change take and focus on the last stanza of the song. I realised that I could take this section and remove some of the aspects that would require prior context, and shorten the sequence of panels to cover most of the content of the verse. Essentially I tried to make it work in its own right rather than drawing the panels from what would be a larger story.
Once I had the thumbnails down I took to drawing out my pencils in a larger format. I used an A3 piece of layout paper to draw four panels and then worked at laying down the pencils.
I switched some of the composition to try and evoke a bit more movement and sense of place, but in hindsight, I think that some of the compositional elements of the fourth panel were stronger in the thumbnail. Whilst some aspects of perspective are better in the pencils, the figure himself seems too big for the position he's in - if I were doing this digitally I would move him down in the composition to better reflect the correct scale.
After I finished the pencils I laid the sheet on my lightbox and placed an A3 sheet of hot press watercolour paper on top. I then inked in each of the panels (which I forgot to scan!) using only a brush and ink - there were a few sections of chainmail where I used a dip pen, but 99% of the image was just done with a brush. I tried to make sure I thought about the light, and where I needed to spot blacks for cast shadow and where I would be able to use colours for that purpose.
After the ink was dry I laid in watercolours, starting with the reds I took my time to add in layers letting previous ones fully dry to try and retain the vibrancy of the colours and avoid muddying things. I then moved to the indigo, starting with areas like the sky where I wanted to try and blend the two colours, and then moved into progressive layers for other parts of the panels.
I really had to try and focus on tone and values so that they worked for both colours, and I was pleased with the depth and dark values that I was able to achieve for the indigo night sky.
Once everything was dry I used some white acrylic ink. I started by laying in a diluted wash over the axe in panel three, which was now too dark and lacked contrast. After this was dry I used a toothbrush with the white ink to add in snowfall. I tried to get the spatters to be larger in the first panel versus the others so that they scaled with the camera shot.
After scanning in, I used Affinity Photo to clean up inky smudges outside of the panels, and lay in new panel borders which were now somewhat pebble-dashed! I also experimented with using a light white airbrush to add in some water vapour to the first panel, to try and show that the character was blowing his hands to keep warm. I was not sure how best to do this with watercolour, so this seemed the most pragmatic approach.
All in all, I am pretty pleased with this work. My brush linework has improved and I took more risks with trying to take a more stylised approach to my imagery. There are lots to learn from this exercise and I think I will be pushing myself to try and take more risks and let go of trying to make everything too realistic. Every time I do that things end up looking flat, stiff or wooden.
I want to embrace more expression, so I need to learn how best to deprogram my fear-driven habits. And how to take images and simplify and exaggerate them. I am thinking about going back to my inspirations as a child like the Beano, and see how I can learn from those cartoons and bring aspects back with me.
There is still a distinct need for me to continue investing my time in core drawing abilities and drawing from life so I can learn the proper forms, shapes and volumes of things. I strongly believe that I need these if I am going to then be able to simplify them well. In my IT work, there is a principle saying "simplicity - the art of what is not done - is essential". What people don't realise is that simple is actually very hard to do. It's a lot easier to make something complicated. That's something I need to remember in my creative work too.
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