In this session we had Graphic Novel illustrator Rachel Ball come in and deliver a workshop about a different type of documentary illustration. This type is all about visually documenting a memory or experience in the form of a comic strip. This is something that really interests me as I enjoy reading comics and like the process of character design. This is an example of a page from one of Rachael’s Graphic novels.
We began the session with Rachael explaining about her own work and creative process. Then she began giving us exercises that she uses when beginning her process. For example think about things such as weird dreams, embarrassing moments, favourite films, advice for your younger self. These were all a way of generating inspiration and thinking about things we like. After this we got into the main focus and that was to think about some early memories. From these we began to develop them into stories by changing bits, adding fantasy elements and just generally playing around with a memory to turn it into an interesting story.
I had a few different ideas but the memory I chose to use was of me and my sister (Eloise) meeting our baby sister (Hannah) for the first time. I wanted to play on this and how me and Eloise loved to play made up games and try to capture this childish imagination. The rough idea for the story would be our parents come and tell us they’ve got a surprise and me and Eloise start thinking of what it could be and end up shocked when they introduce us to our new baby sister. I want to included images to illustrate our imaginary ideas such as dragons and aliens.
So for this story there are 5 characters I will need to design, Me, Eloise, baby Hannah and my parents. Designing these was the focus of the afternoon session.
Rachael taught us some ways to being the process of designing a character such as creating fluid lines and turning them into animals or people, drawing people from observation, researching other artists. One in particular that stood out to me was the idea of caricature which is where you exaggerate features to capture someone’s essence. I to ok this into our first exercise where we had to draw characters faces from different shapes such as ovals and triangles. I enjoyed just picking a shape and turning it into a made up character.
When designing my characters faces and body shapes I took a lot of inspiration from Disney Pixar’s character designs such as Deanna Marsiglise. It’s an art style I’ve loved since I was a child and have always admired how well the artists are able to convey emotions and personality through the facial expressions and dramatic body shapes.
Then we moved onto creating figures out of shapes. I tried to caricature the figures by really exaggerating the proportions or certain body parts.
I started these with bendy stick figures to create more dynamic figures to try to express movements or emotions which are key to graphic novel art.
Then I started to develop one of the characters that I wanted to use in the comic strip (myself). I tested out different expressions, angles, and poses to begin to get an essence of the character.
I digitally sketched the face and body shape for one of the characters and started to think about colours for the face, hair and clothes.
I then made another character sheet for my older sister (Eloise). I aimed to keep the shapes of the body and face consistent to both characters. At the bottom of the page is a full sketch of the 2 characters I’ve worked on so far.
After try out lots of body shapes these are the ones I’ve decided to go with for each character. They have a similar style that makes them look cohesive but each figure has key differences to make the easily distinguishable and recognisable.
I really enjoyed this session about graphic novels and character design. Rachael Ball gave lots of good advice that I’ll try to implement into my own work such as building bodies and faces from shapes caricaturing someone to exaggerate features. I look forward to expanding upon my characters in the next session.
Samuel Green Illustration 