Video Bonus

From the Graphic Novel Intensive class at PNCA, here's Ellen Forney on inking:

Outcomes assessment #7

This is the seventh in a series of analyses of exercises and activities from the Graphic Novel Intensive class at PNCA.

Number 1 is here.
Number 2 is here.
Number 3 is here.
Number 4 is here.
Number 5 is here.
Number 6 is here.

Dan's major assignment: (Studio work, days four and five)

On the afternoon of Thursday, the fourth day of instruction, Dan put us into studio mode. There was no lecture or class discussion; we were just to begin creating our final piece for the class. Working together in the classroom, we were to conceive, write, design, and draw a two-page comics story. All the comics would be collected for publication as representative of the GNI class. There were no parameters to the assignment, other than the suggested length.

My own participation in the assignment wound up being curtailed. The class continued until Saturday, and the intention was to use Thursday afternoon, all day Friday, and all day Saturday to create to the piece. My own plans had changed and I would not be able to stay for the Saturday session, so I unilaterally reduced my contribution to one page, preferring a complete shorter work to a rushed or incomplete longer work. I also made the decision to create an imaginary comic book house ad rather than a sort autobiographical piece, which was the the form of choice for most of the class (a strong Forney influence there, I thought); I wanted to work more on my actual art and rendering than on the plotting and storytelling, and to play with the techniques we had been working on all week.

I started with rough thumbnails instead of an actual script:

The premise of the imaginary house ad was that an upcoming series would feature the Universal Studios movie monsters as private detectives. This is an idea I had been kicking around for several years without any product, so the content came easily (nice for the time constraints). I thought on the initial layout had a nice balance.

From there, I moved on to pencils:

I decided on the twelve-panel grid probably because in my mind I was envisioning some Sandman stories (perhaps by Creig Flessel) that used such a grid to good effect. I used some photo references for the art, such as pictures of Humphrey Bogart for the collar and hat brim details, and (believe it or not) an anatomy shot for the foot detail in panel two. As I laid the page out, I thought I was introducing too many characters, so The Phantom of the Opera was cut. I did the pencils on plain copy paper, the better to work with a light box on the inking stage, in the manner of Ellen Forney.

Speaking of inking:

Since my intent was to thrash around with new tools, I tried to stick with the brush pens for most of the inking and pay attention to line weights and such. Given my limited skill set, I'm not sure how successful the approach was. I did make the conscious decision to do minimal hand-inking and no hand-lettering; Photoshop was going to be a big contributor to the final product.

To wit:

All of the black backgrounds are obviously Photoshop fill; I can't imagine trying to do this with hand lettering. I also threw some grayscale fills in, most noticeably on the Creature's hat and trenchcoat; I'm not sure how successful that choice was without complete consistency. One detail that I think worked particularly well was the reversing of the Invisible Man's glasses from black to white in the final panel so they would show against the background. All the lettering was done in Photoshop, of course, and I think most of it works with the exception of panel three, where it gets lost. And panel four shows the most computer work: not only has the figure been reduced and moved, but the streetlight was added in

The obvious deficiency in the page, regardless of the techniques used or the relative lack of drawing ability, is the almost complete dearth of background detail in the panels that could have really used some. The Bride may have an iMac (with poor perspective), but that appears to be the only thing in her office - even the wall appears to be a caption box (with poor proportions) - and the cast appears to be posing in some sort of dark gymnasium for the final shot.

The point of the exercise - for me, at any rate - was to experience, at least in some small scale, the pulling together of all the pieces, particularly on the art side, that go into making a comic. As someone who routinely reads and criticizes comics, I felt it was important to have this experience, and in regards to that outcome, at least, the exercise was successful. My appreciation of the level of engagement and the attention to detail necessary to produce comic art with both the communicative and aesthetic properties intended has been expanded and deepened. I only have to look at my own meager effort, and be reminded that even with photo references in front of me I forgot to render the classic P.I. trenchcoat as double-breasted, to sustain my awareness of how much actual work goes into the making of a successful page and how easily one can miss the target.

As an opportunity for developing talents and techniques, I am not as sure how successful the exercise was. Perhaps I cannot speak to this with sufficient qualification, since I missed almost half of the time allotted, but the work-all-day-with-the-instructor-wandering-around method didn't seem as helpful to that objective as some other models might have been. The differences in level of artistic ability and familiarity with comics form seemed pretty great, however, so I'm not sure what that approach might have been.

And perhaps that was the most problematic element of the whole class. Making comics takes the synthesis of a wide array of skills that come from the writer's toolkit, and the painter's and the graphic designer's, as well as from that very specific toybox of comics conventions. My lingering impression is, that as far as instruction goes, a focus on one of these dimensions of the craft at a time is more successful, at least in the classroom environment. Pulling them all together is a great capstone demonstration.

---

That's the final entry in the assignment-by-assignment breakdown of the Graphic Novel Intensive class. If you are interested in seeing the final products from all eighteen students - many of whom produced work a lot better than mine - you can buy the class album from Lulu Press.

Outcomes Assessment #6

This is the sixth in a series of analyses of exercises and activities from the Graphic Novel Intensive class at PNCA.

Number 1 is here.
Number 2 is here.
Number 3 is here.
Number 4 is here.
Number 5 is here.
Number 7 is here.

Ellen's major assignment: (Homework, days one through three)

On the first day of class, Ellen Forney gave us the assignment that was to be turned in on day four, the last day she was instructing. We were to write an autobiographical comic in six to nine panels, oriented vertically. The suggested themes were "how did you get that scar?", "interaction with a stranger," 'clothes shopping with your opposite-sex parent," and "your most embarrassing moment." I chose the interaction with a stranger, and decided to tell the story of an encounter with a cranky waitress.

Monday: Since the comic was bound to be fairly Forneyesque anyway, I decided to go the whole empty vessel route and use her techniques, or as close as I could approximate. Rather than work full-script (like writing a screenplay) or the draw first/write later system I can only call "the Marvel way" (in which the art takes precedence and the dialogue is added afterward), Forney uses an idiosyncratic method: she writes the story in a sort of prose outline, and then blocks out the text into panels before moving onto thumbnails. My version of this approach wound up looking like this:

As a writing teacher, I encourage my students to at least experiment with new heuristics and ways of drafting, and it was in this spirit that I attempted this method. It felt like it had some advantages over a simple outline, but I'm not sure that it didn't detract from some sense of the visual. The prose rendering might encourage verbal beats rather than visual ones, but perhaps not.

In any event, working from that marked-up "script," I developed these thumbnails:


As I was creating the strip, I realized that I was adopting some of Forney's style, particularly the reliance on narrative captions to carry much of the story.

Tuesday: In class the next day, we broke into small groups for peer review. The upshot for my strip was the realization that I needed to reverse the layout for the punchline to work; if I didn't, the word balloon would be out of sync with the visuals. I also decided to use my all-text panel as an introduction rater than a denouement. That evening after class, I managed these pencils, working on bristol board:

I kept the setting as simple as possible so that things would look pretty much the same from panel to panel; I thought a static setting was important to the story. For that same reason, I stuck to stick figures; I didn't trust my art talent to render consistent figures with anything more elaborate.

Wednesday: We didn't have time to review our finished pencils in class on Wednesday, partly because Forney gave an inking demonstration for the first part of the morning. Our homework for Wednesday night was to ink the penciled strip. Although I experimented with brush-pens during the day, I couldn't work up the nerve to use a regular brush, chickening out in the end and inking the whole thing with Flair pens. I worked the way Forney does, with the pencils under a new sheet on a light box, so there's no erasing of stray pencil lines. Here's how it turned out:


I don't know how much I improved the art, and how much I lost with my crappy technique. You can see that I edited the captions and dialogue during this process as well.

But for Forney, the finished product of a comic is never the original art, it is the reproduction, so there was still one step. I scanned the inked page, cleaned it up a little bit with Photoshop, and printed it off: that was the final submission. Here's the file that I printed:

Thursday: We did the by-now familiar hang-up-all-the-work-and-critique-it exercise. My strip got decent reviews; Forney thought that I had captured the body language, particularly of the waitress, pretty well.

The point of the exercise was to experience all the steps of creating a strip, which Forney had enumerated as our first lesson on Monday morning:

Idea
Research
Script
Thumbnails
Good Pencils
Inks
Scan/Tweak
Reduce/Reproduce

In that respect, the activity was a success. Following the process through from beginning to end, even on a greatly telescoped schedule, gave insights into the relationship between the different elements of creation that I don't think could have been gained by discussion. The scope of the assignment was narrow enough to be practicable, yet broad enough to require engagement with and decisions about page layout, pacing, dialogue, and character design. All of McCloud's five choices were forced upon us, to good effect.

I wonder, perhaps, whether there would still be room in a course like this for an additional, extended exercise. Completing a full-script version of a longer work would be very useful for those primarily interested in the writing side of the comics game; similarly, illustrating a full script (or even a treatment) would give those students who really wanted to work on their visual language a chance to experiment with different versions of the same narrative, without worrying about creating the narrative in the first place (and some students on the class had as hard a time coming up with things to say as I did managing to draw effectively).

In my case, as someone who doesn't hesitate to critique the comics he reads, it was instructive to have to go through the whole cycle of creating one.