Thought Bubble - Sketch Spotlight 2

One of the first subjects broached at the Sketching Spotlight, as usual, was of routine. Carroll and Boulet were agreed that their routines were largely chaos, but that was okay as long as they hit their deadlines. They would do a lot of work through the last minute panic.

The bits of animation on Boulet's websites weren't necessarily planned, but he saw where he could put some so he did it. Since at lot of the artists at the panel show their work digitally, they have to think about how their work would look in print if they wanted to sell/distribute it. Carroll finds it very hard to use her work in print, since she utilises everything that a digital medium can give her, like scroll bars, clicks, hovering and gifs etc.

Carroll also uses a lot of thumbnails and layout planning in her script book. She looks at webcomics as being less of a financial investment, and didn't know how to get into print comics anyway. She uses traditional pencils/inks and then colors and edits digitally and she prefers penciling and inking manually and then switching to digital for colouring and editing.

Boulet said it was 'hard not to get eaten by the machine' when talking about digital art; a new tool makes him want to test all of the limits, especially Photoshop, although this could make his art a bit inconsistent rather than sticking to the same thing he has done for his projects. He also like water colours because they make it easier to be lazy - he can use water colours while he watches the TV.

Tarr commented that life drawing informed her work and actually made her cartoonier style much better. Corsetto agreed and said that one of her only regularly scheduled things as life drawing and that she enjoyed the shorter poses a lot more, since they are great for cartoonists. She doesn't like the 40 minute poses as much though - "what would you do for 40 minutes?" Corsetto's mentor always old her to think more and draw less. Tarr gets bored of rendering and also prefers much shorter poses.

Boulet commented that it was hard to give up control to an assistant or a collaborative partner; it was more interesting leaving them to do what they wanted, otherwise it ended up too close to his ideas so he re-did a lot of work in stick figures to give them more of an opportunity to do their own stuff. Carrol doesn't like giving negative feedback, so it is easier working on her own.

Carrol likes to use her dream journal as inspiration for comics which somehow meant she had less nightmares, and she also continues to work on her stories as she goes along rather having it all 100% to how it was planned.

Boulet finds it boring to ink over pencils - he would rather ink straight away, and improvise. He also commented that it was weird to achieve a dream that you wanted and hate it; he found it more fun to to sketchbooks and silly little comics, so he went into webcomics instead. His job was suddenly interesting again and he would get instant feedback which was much more fun and he left doing printed comics - "Now I'm happy and rich!"

Something that came up in this part of the panel was ages; Boulet is 39, Carrol is 33, Corsetto is 31 and Tarr is 27. All have been doing comics from around their 20s, mid 20s. Corsetto doesn't plan well - her characters aren't planned much before hand and he 'fans know more abut my characters than me'.

Boulet said that webcomics were expensive to do on his own website, but he ended up getting all of the site stuff done free from a fan after complaining about it on Twitter - this fan now does all of his programming/coding for him.

It was interesting to look at the different ways that these artists work and their reasons for choosing digital or traditional media. Webcomics would be an interesting thing to look into although they would require a lot of motivation.

Thought Bubble - Sketch Spotlight Artist Introduction

I didn't know any of the artists involved in the Sketch Spotlight this year, but that didn't make the panel any less fun. A lot of the artists this year work primarily on webcomics or comics presented digitally, so it was interesting to hear about their different processes and way of working than the artists the year before. this years artists were as follows;

Danielle Corsetto, writer/artist of the webcomic Girls With Slingshots which celebrates it's 10th year this year. It is a slice of life webcomic well known for its well done depictions of characters with disabilities, and LGBTQ characters.

  

Emily Carroll is an illustrator who studied animation at university, and creates a lot of horror comics on her website. She has had her work featured in a few anthologies (especially ones collecting horror stories) and he work has also been featured in games  The Yawhg and Gone Home.

Babs Tarr is a freelance illustrator now drawing the Batgirl comic for DC comics. She has also done some game art/character design for the Facebook game 'Wormwood' before working in comics. Her work can be found on Tumblr, Instagram, DeviantArt and Etsy among other places.

   Boulet is a French cartoonist posting comic strips to his cartoon blog since 2004. This has made him very big in France and his work has been published in several volumes. His work is largely in French, although some have been translated to English and in 2009 he began an English version of his blog, achieving wider success among other countries.

Thought Bubble - Sketching Spotlight

Sketching Spotlight

I visited the Sketching Spotlight Panel at Thought Bubble where 4 artists answered questions and talked about their creative processes while others had their drawings projected on the screen as they were drawing. The artists there were Ming Doyle, Fiona Staples and twins Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba, all of whom work in comics/illustration.

I found it very interesting not only as a solo artist, but from a collaboration viewpoint. One of the ideas that came up a few times was that a collaboration, to many of them, was helping one another with ideas; it wasn't just a case on one person does one job and another person does theirs. They work better in a creative time where both know each others' styles, strengths and weaknesses in order to play off of them as best they can and keep improving each others' work.

Fiona Staples

Ming said that working in mainstream comics can feel a lot like drawing fanart at time, except that you are getting paid for it. Being able to draw other characters in your style is a very good skill to have which is shown greatly in the comics industry, but I think that does limit your opportunity to design big mainstream characters. Obviously you need at least a few as new and background characters in your comics - however the less mainstream comics, or non-superhero comics such as Saga drawn by Fiona Staples [left] are all original characters, with input from writers but creative freedom after that, which sounds like it would be a much more fun experience.

Ming Doyle

Fiona worked exclusively with digital media in her earlier career, with a Cintiq which didn't feel as different to traditional drawing as graphics tablets do. She now also uses a blue mechanical pencil to draw simpler shapes before inking. Ming Doyle also likes to use a lot of digital art in her sequential work just because of the time it saves her so that she can reach deadlines much easier. Both artists use MangaStudio for digital inking (recommended to them by Jamie McKelvie) with varying adjustment correction, and Ming works all at 25% for her drawings, which is a terrifying idea to me. She also does all of her midtones before the dark colors and then lays everything up. Fiona blows her thumbnails up, inks them in MangaStudio and then colors in Photoshop.

Some comments were made that some artists start of with comics etc to realise what they want to do art wise later and then realise that drawing comics is what they want to do, whereas some like Ming Doyle always wanted to draw to tell stories. They also talk about being invisible in their comics - that the art should flow so well that you don't even notice as you get carried away with the comic and the storytelling.

Gabriel Ba

Fabio Moon

Self-publishing is a good technique for starting out with a lot of first time stories being published through company 2000AD.  It was also said that a lot of the interesting comics come from people who don't actually make comics for a living - different experiences and ways of working works very well to create new and different stories.

Other advice was don't be afraid to learn on the job! "You're never really gonna be ready" was said which I think applies to a lot of different art form and fields. You need to build up a visual library which should not be limited to just things in comics/the style you want to work in.
 Gabriel Ba suggests to "hire a cute assistant to do your erasing" to avoid the pain of rubbing out so many lines.

Though most of the ideas came from two of the artists, it was really interesting to compare the way that some of them works, how they started in their pieces and their compositions. I definitely hope to go to this panel again next year, as some of the advice has been really helpful.

Thought Bubble Sequential Art Festival + YA Panel

The first convention I ever went to was Thought Bubble Sequential Art Festival in 2012 and it was more fun than I could have imagined; that meant that I definitely had to go this year, and with of the panels I managed to visit this time as well, it was even better.

One of my favorite things about the whole convention was the friendly atmosphere, and the chance to talk to illustrators with various levels of experience. I spoke to a couple who launched their comic online and had a few copies at hand, comic artists working for Marvel/DC/Image and illustrators just planning selling their own prints. It was great to learn a bit about how people started making money from their art after uni or even just sixth form, and I'm definitely tempted to get a table in a few years and try selling some of my own stuff.

A highlight of the convention for me was the Young Avengers panel. The series was announced to be ending a few weeks before meaning that this would be my last chance to hear the writer and artist of my favorite comic talk about that comic, so it was something I definitely could not miss.

Being the end of the series by choice, and not by cancellation, they decided to do something a little bit different. The last two issues used a New Year's Eve party to wrap things up, and they got the help of a lot of different artists to draw short stories from the event.
Jamie McKelvie is the usual artist on Young Avengers, meaning that he still got the most control over the two issues even though he was only doing art for a small part of it. He told us that he uses Google Sketch Up to plan out backgrounds for a lot of his scenes, to keep track of the locations and for certain angles. He sent the plan for background to all of the artists involved so that they were kept consistent and understandable. Jamie also gave the other artists some control over his characters' appearances; they all had specific character stories that they were each drawing, but if someone drew a background character first, they would send the pages to to the other artists and that was the outfit that they would have to use, again keeping it all consistent

Example of Sketchup - Not McKelvie's work

Gillen and McKelvie, the artist and writer keep a blog with inspiration for outfits and music to go with their comics as inspiration and reference, something they can work on at all times and not just from their desks.

Below are some pages drawn by other artists over the two issues;

Annie Wu

Emma Viceli

Becky Cloonan

Christian Ward

Joe Quinones

Ming Doyle

Double cover by Jamie McKelvie