In this session we continued on with the Graphic Novel Your Life workshop with Rachael Ball. I learnt some very important things in this session such as the fundamentals of making an engaging story with interesting characters, how to pace a comic and how to effectively storyboard ideas. Most stories, even those with complex plots can usually be simplified down to a main charters goal, obstacle and action. This is key to creating a story and I’ll keep this in mind for the future. In the session we took the story we had thought of with the characters we’d created and create quick thumbnail sketches. These are my quick thumbnail sketches that I did to show my story.
These are very rough sketches, just enough to get the point across. After making these I looked through them and began to add in frames and remove ones to adjust the flow and pacing of the story. This is a good idea to do in the early stages so that you don’t waste time on lots of detailed sketches just to remove them later on. Rachael also taught us about framing in a comic and how this can impact the message it conveys. For example wide shots are good at the start to show the location and close up shots are good for drama.
After creating the thumbnails I made the layout for the comic strip. My story is not a complex story it’s just a short wholesome story so I wanted to keep it within 2 pages. Some boxes are bigger than other others demoing of the importance of the frame. The frames where me and my sister are imaging what the surprise could be are large to give me space to show the vivid childish imaginations.
I then developed my comic strip into a more detailed storyboard. I used the layout from above. The images stay fairly similar to my initial sketches but are all more refined and neat. I really like how the pages turned out with the consistency of the images and pace of the story telling. I can see the Disney character inspiration coming though well in the illustrations. If I was to colour this comic strip I would use a simple and bold style to make the illustrations eye catching and help reflect the childish and light hearted story.
Creating characters and comic stripes is something I want to do more of as I’d like to improve of showing emotion through dynamic, caricatured characters.
Samuel Green Illustration 