Yesterday morning I went into uni for a talk by guest speaker, Isabel Greenberg. I hadn't come across Isabel's work before so I wasn't sure what to expect at this talk, but it turned out to be one of the most best talks I have been to. Isabel is only a few years ahead of us, having graduated 3 and a half years ago, so its great to hear from someone who has been in our position so recently. She explained what has happened to her in her career since she left uni, and how she has gotten to where she is now, which was really inspiring.
Isabel is a comic artist and graphic novelist and recently won the Observer Jonathan Cape Graphic Short Story Prize 2011 with her short comic, Love in a very cold climate. Her style of drawing is really appealing to me as she uses a lot of pattern detail in her work, and works in a limited colour palette with a little bit of texture added in (all things that I enjoy using in my own work). Isabel also explained how a lot of her work is based on existing stories which she then adapts for her comics, and often she combines several stories together, which is the sort of thing I am aiming to do for this current project.
These are a few of my favourites of Isabel's work:
1. Page from Isabel's Graphic Novel, The Encyclopaedia of Early Earth
2. Page from The Encyclopaedia of Early Earth
3. Page from seven page comic, Masters of the Universe
4. Page from Isabel's winning entry to the Observer Jonathan Cape Graphic Short Story Prize 2011, Love in a very cold climate
Isabel also made a few suggestions to do with self publishing, and named a few good small press events such as Thought Bubble and The New Lakes. This is something I will definitely be looking into as I already enjoy printing and selling my own work, but haven't been to these kinds of events before.
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In the afternoon, we went back into the studio for a 2 hour comic workshop.
To start off with we were given 5 minutes to create a simple 3 panel comic, after which we all had to try and guess what each other's stories were. The 5 minute time slot then made the next hour to create a longer comic seem much more reasonable! I chose Sleeping Beauty for my full comic and used animals as the characters as I have been doing in my project. This was the result:
I am quite pleased with what I managed to produce in an hour, and it was really useful to try out quickly illustrating a narrative. It was also good to see some of ideas come to fruition, I've been spending quite a lot of time drawing the animals but until this piece of work I hadn't had a chance to see how the characters work in situ. I may use this way of working to produce my storyboards later in the project as it worked quite well for me and is more exciting to do than a standard storyboard.
Isabel also suggested a refillable brush pen called the Pentel Pocket. I'll be looking into that as a way of keeping the varied line thickness without the mess and constant dipping of a brush and ink.