Watching: old seasons of the Great British Bakeoff
Reading:
Listening to: Rudy Stone
Working on: a fun little NewOldRare mini comic
I’ve been working on the art for a graphic novel pitch for a little while this year, off and on, though I drew the thumbnails for the first sixteen pages when I finished the script a couple of years ago. It’s called Cratediggers (at the moment) and it’s about three highschool friends in their first year of university in London in 2012. They’ve spent their teenage years looking for a rumoured bootleg of their favourite punk band’s final ever show, and a new lead pops up. Isaac, the main character, has been happily existing as a middle ground between the stronger personalities of his two best friends for years. Julia’s flourishing in university, she knows where she wants to go and she’s loving meeting new people – like Dylan. Tim’s really struggling, both with change and herself. They all belong to an online forum for fans of the band Undying Spite (who are fictional, sorry to everyone who looked them up), where they meet the much older Paul.
It’s about dealing with changes (in yourself, in others, in life), making decisions on where to go next, and music. In some ways, it’s a fond letter to my own adolescence, which was spent in relentless pursuit of music.
Early this year, I redid the character sheets. Character design is my least favourite bit of anything, so this was an ordeal, but I got them where I’m happy with them. Isaac and Julia were the easiest, Dylan started with his fashion sense and grew outwards, and Tim was tricky to get the balance right on. Paul was the hardest, but in the end I just based him loosely on one of my own teenage crushes, Ted Leo. Isaac can have my taste in men, as a treat. Apologies to Ted Leo, I guess?
I drew the first twelve pages digitally, which wasn’t too hard, then spent months driving myself crazy over it. The thumbnails were in colour, I coloured one page and remembered I kind of hate doing digital colouring and also this book is three hundred and twenty seven pages. It’s not in my budget to hire someone to colour it and I am a total control freak anyway.
Then I tried a limited colour look. Okay, I love a 2-4 colour palette, but I don’t know if this is right. I just don’t know. It also doesn’t make it cheaper to print the same way greyscale does.
Then I switched to digital greyscale tones, tried multiple approaches, but it never seemed right. It wasn’t organic enough. It was too muddy. It was pissing me off, I kept thinking “I could do this so much faster with inkwash” and I seriously considered seeing if my printer could handle Bristol board that I could just slop ink on top of.
I even tried some heavier blacks, just inks, no tones, which I kind of liked. Not there yet though.
My friend Tanya is doing gorgeous organic digital inkwash-style work for her own book, Count the Lights, but I know I’d hate every second trying to do something similar. So one night at 11:30pm, knowing I had to get up at 6am for work, I printed out the digital inks for page one and lightboxed them directly onto 9×12 Bristol. Unfortunately, it looked just fucking right. Then, a few days later, I put down inkwash tones and added pencil and gel pen detailing. Nailed it. Fuck me. Yeah, it’s loose, but it suits the story.
I didn’t mean to go back to being a traditional artist. I think digital is great: I love thumbnailing and sketching digitally, and god knows storyboarding is easier digitally, working straight onto the timeline and scrubbing back and forth. Preparing art for risograph printing is easy digitally, and design work like stickers are better done digitally. I was an early adopter of digital art as my dad has been a computer technician since the early 90s, though because I didn’t have a tablet until university I scanned ink drawings and coloured them with the mouse.
Now, I have better digital tools and I know how to use them, but I find myself returning repeatedly to physical media. The many times when I’ve tried digital painting for a finished piece, I’ve just gotten irritated about it. I know there are brushes that mimic organic looks very well, I’ve got some of them. That’s not the issue. The problem is I don’t often enjoy the process at all, not the way I enjoy working traditionally. Watercolour is not a forgiving medium and coloured inkwash even less so. You can’t paint over it like with oils or acrylics, so you’d better be sure. You can’t fix flaws, you have to work against the clock with drying, you have to know what media is going to do. Whom amongst us has not made a late in the game discovery that their ink is not waterproof? Digital doesn’t have those problems, but I still can’t get comfortable there.
Also: digital art made by people is art, I’m not interested in that debate at all, fuck off. I’m not a snob or a purist. I know so many people who make incredible work in all styles using digital, there are very good reasons for using it commercially, and it has been amazing at times when I didn’t have space to work physically or money for art supplies. Put an iPad Pro in front of someone who can’t draw on paper and surprise, they can’t fucking draw in Procreate either. The magic ingredient is skills, the driving force is individuality and vision, and I unfortunately know I can do what I want so much easier if I open my watercolour tins or take out my ink pen. My problem with my own digital art and why it sometimes doesn’t feel “real” to me is because it doesn’t always come out the way I want it to; it doesn’t feel like my work. It’s taken me a long time to figure this out. I’m not giving up digital, I’m sure I’ll do other comics fully digitally, or mixed media.
I’ll still do the lettering digitally, for readability and flexibility. I might invest in a slightly more organic font if the book gets picked up. Here’s page one:
