![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
egypturnashLast night I got my butt out of the house for once and went out to hook up with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
eselgeist, kanawinkie, and abecat to go see Scott McCloud lecture. mister_wolf and a friend were there too. His whirlwind tour of every state in the entire US is here right now.
Mostly, his lecture was a hour-long encapsulation of the themes in his new book, Making Comics. I picked up a copy of it and got it signed. I read it in the signing line, once everyone else had left, and on the way home. He's got a lot to say in it; it's a good book, you should get it if you have any thoughts of making comics. it's not revalatory the way Understanding was but maybe that's just because I read that book when I was much less aware of the processes.
Reading through it, I focus on some of the things I'm conscious of in my work right now. Doesn't everyone?
One of the big excuses I have for not starting that Major Comics Project of mine is backgrounds. The Drowning City is a specific place, damnit, not a generic Big City - it's a distorted version of New Orleans in the 1970s and 80s. It's not a major character in the story, but there's a mood, and a distinct look. I got ahold of some reference, and have been flipping through it, trying to absorb details, realizing things like how heavily atmospheric perspective plays into any view of that humid place.
McCloud has some analysis of the differences between American, European, and Japanese comics in Making. One of the things he points out as being a hallmark of European comics is a sense of place - a creator from there is far more likely to have an element of detailed backgrounds in every panel, a very definite location. I've been aware of this lately myself, as I reacquaint myself with some of my European influences and think about my own projects.
Back in animation school, one of my classmates told me he thought I had a really European style, in his eyes. Learning to love Kirby's work as an adult has, I think, made my style much more "American". But looking through European comics, I was always aware of the casual integration of setting into the art that I've really avoided most of my life.
I've got too many excuses for not starting this damn thing. I'm still unsure about the method I'll use - it wants to be all painterly but I really can't paint, digitally or physically. I experiment with tricks to get some of that in my work but it takes so much time to fake it. Maybe I should just let go of some of my default rules and do something crazy like let the physical roughs shine through in the final art for a change; that would provide the raw kineticness of my inner vision of this without the additional delay of a year or two learning to fucking paint. I've been sitting on this for six years now already, as life gets in the way.
And the story's constructed in such a way that if I do learn to paint in the time I'm doing it, well, I can just do a chunk of it that way.
But right now, life is in the way of wanting to Do Comics: I need to pull on some clothes and go get some Coke, then sit down and get in the groove on making a canine version of Donna Summer sing about being hungry for scraps from the Thanksgiving table. Buying the full version of Animslider last night should help that; the free version helped streamline Flash workflow a lot, and the full version isn't restricted to quickly sliding through just seven frames.
(Addendum: Mentioning AS Pro made me decide to hunt around the officialMacromediaAdobe extension site to see if people had written other UI plugins to fix the broken UI. Unfortunately, said extension site is a perfect example of why you should not build a website in Flash: the browser back button never works any more even though it all looks like a normal webpage, no control over links, navigation by tiny, hard-to-see Flash sliders. Ye gods, it's frustrating to dig through.)
eselgeist, kanawinkie, and abecat to go see Scott McCloud lecture. mister_wolf and a friend were there too. His whirlwind tour of every state in the entire US is here right now.Mostly, his lecture was a hour-long encapsulation of the themes in his new book, Making Comics. I picked up a copy of it and got it signed. I read it in the signing line, once everyone else had left, and on the way home. He's got a lot to say in it; it's a good book, you should get it if you have any thoughts of making comics. it's not revalatory the way Understanding was but maybe that's just because I read that book when I was much less aware of the processes.
Reading through it, I focus on some of the things I'm conscious of in my work right now. Doesn't everyone?
One of the big excuses I have for not starting that Major Comics Project of mine is backgrounds. The Drowning City is a specific place, damnit, not a generic Big City - it's a distorted version of New Orleans in the 1970s and 80s. It's not a major character in the story, but there's a mood, and a distinct look. I got ahold of some reference, and have been flipping through it, trying to absorb details, realizing things like how heavily atmospheric perspective plays into any view of that humid place.
McCloud has some analysis of the differences between American, European, and Japanese comics in Making. One of the things he points out as being a hallmark of European comics is a sense of place - a creator from there is far more likely to have an element of detailed backgrounds in every panel, a very definite location. I've been aware of this lately myself, as I reacquaint myself with some of my European influences and think about my own projects.
Back in animation school, one of my classmates told me he thought I had a really European style, in his eyes. Learning to love Kirby's work as an adult has, I think, made my style much more "American". But looking through European comics, I was always aware of the casual integration of setting into the art that I've really avoided most of my life.
I've got too many excuses for not starting this damn thing. I'm still unsure about the method I'll use - it wants to be all painterly but I really can't paint, digitally or physically. I experiment with tricks to get some of that in my work but it takes so much time to fake it. Maybe I should just let go of some of my default rules and do something crazy like let the physical roughs shine through in the final art for a change; that would provide the raw kineticness of my inner vision of this without the additional delay of a year or two learning to fucking paint. I've been sitting on this for six years now already, as life gets in the way.
And the story's constructed in such a way that if I do learn to paint in the time I'm doing it, well, I can just do a chunk of it that way.
But right now, life is in the way of wanting to Do Comics: I need to pull on some clothes and go get some Coke, then sit down and get in the groove on making a canine version of Donna Summer sing about being hungry for scraps from the Thanksgiving table. Buying the full version of Animslider last night should help that; the free version helped streamline Flash workflow a lot, and the full version isn't restricted to quickly sliding through just seven frames.
(Addendum: Mentioning AS Pro made me decide to hunt around the official
no subject
Date: 2006-09-27 02:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-27 04:07 pm (UTC)Heavy Meta
Date: 2006-09-27 05:02 pm (UTC)My buddy G swore by Zot! but I've only read an issue or two he had lying around.
Heavy Meta, part II
Date: 2006-09-27 05:03 pm (UTC)... but his meta-comics are what really got to me.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-27 05:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-28 12:57 am (UTC)And more than a few books on art processes are entirely hand-lettered...
no subject
Date: 2006-09-28 04:31 am (UTC)