Joy, Joy, Joy, Joy of Drawing

Rather then cook up characters out of thin air I thought I'd peruse my collected drawings for candidates. I have boxes and boxes of stuff I've drawn over the years and I kept them "in case I could ever use them in the future." That future is here!

I then plop myself on our living room couch and think graphically!

I didn't leave clear directions when plotting chapter one so I'm using sticky notes to figure out who is sitting where.

I then sketch the character on rough Draft Five. I'm coloring them in, too, just for the fun of it. Pictured above: the character I've named Karenoia (the anxiety queen), and Joker (the bon mot king). I've also got preliminary drawings of Dr. Q, TA, and a few others.

This new stage of creation has my adrenaline pumping, dopamine surging, and serotonin gushing. The pleasure is hard to describe but take my word for it, few endeavors bring me this much joy.

Talk About Options.....

Once again my reach exceeds my grasp. Doing layouts is more time consuming than I initially realized. It's fun work, but can't be rushed. Take for example the following page of dialog. There are four speakers and six word balloons. (The final cartoon will have six speakers but I grabbed this page at random and am too impatient to find a page that better illustrates my point).


Since eyes scan left to right, top to bottom, Dr. Q is always in upper left hand corner. But there are dozens of variations of how to arrange the other speakers in the panels.


Rather than give four speakers four word balloons (Sample One below), I stretched the text in panels two and three, and four and five, in order to slow down time. The nanosecond it takes for readers to move their eyes from one panel to the next is just enough time to create the illusion of passing time.

SAMPLE ONE

With the magic of Publisher program I can combine panels; Sample Two (below) has been morphed from six to two panels...and I've added several non speaking characters. I'm toying with the idea of having these "extras" tell their own story in pantomime.

SAMPLE TWO

Now notice what happened in Sample Three (below). With a rearranging of word balloon "tails" and linking them I can move speakers around in the panels. Readers see the speakers with their word balloons when I place them to the left of the panel....or readers see the words first and find out later who is doing the speaking when I move speakers to the right.

SAMPLE THREE

These minor details aren't so minor. While I'm not really sure which way is best, my gut tells me to try 'em all and keep readers' attention with variation.

The option to make panels vertical isn't really an option. There are no tall buildings, aerial shots, or flying birds to accommodate. The pictures really are in service of the words and not the other way around. Getting too fancy with the illustrations would, I suspect, detract from the story.

Bringing Draft Number Two in for a Landing

Today is May 13 (2012). My deadline for finishing draft two is May 15. I think I'll make it! Already I'm drooling over the next tasks. Once all 420 pages are completed I'm going to:

• read the whole thing cover to cover in hard copy. I'm still old fashioned enough that I don't trust editing on screens. I'll be looking for major plot gaffs, repetitions, and other errors.
• read the whole thing through the eyes of each character. One of the reasons I've attached pictures to the word balloons is so I can scan the document with my eyes tracing the dialog of each character. Are they consistent? Do any of them make out of character comments? Is there growth (toward or away from Dr. Q)? 
• read the whole thing again visualizing sections. I've broken the twelve chapters into 25 working files (EU1 to EU25). But each of those files contains thought units which will be identified by unique background colors. Within each thought unit I'll be checking to see how many characters are present, how many I can expunge, replace, or combine with others?

Once those corrections are made I then begin the delicious work of printing finished pages on which to draw pencil roughs. This will help with blocking (where characters stand), setting (what's on the class room walls?), clothing, passage of time, etc.

Final draft four will be lightly penciled, then inked, then colored with color pencils.

I hope to scan those pages for public consumption either here on Blogger (if the quality coheres) or on a new website dedicated to this project. The anticipation is releasing dopamine into my system even as I type. Creativity is so much fun. 

First Full Pages

I've been creating this graphic novel on Microsoft Publisher. Each phrase from Ecclesiastes is printed in the word balloon of the first of six panels on an 8.5" x 11" (landscape) page. My plan from the beginning was to clip and paste two landscape pages on top of each other in the Paint program. Having just reached page number 250 I thought I'd combine two landscape pages for the very first time.

Disclaimer: the faces are provisional, the word balloons need a new font (Comic Sans is over used) in all caps (as seems to be the industry standard) and they lack the tail thingy that lets readers know who is speaking. The coloring is haphazard, the pagination is convoluted (250 Publisher landscape pages = 125 Paint pages; not sure how to number them yet). My point in this exercise is to check the readability of the word balloons and to see if the background color makes them more legible. The text is in its second draft so further editing is in store.

Background. There are four characters in this thought unit, Mr Q (speaking the words of Ecclesiastes), the evangelical Christian girl who is sweet on the militaristic vet, both of whom are chided by the feminist with big hair.

Here are the results.

Addendum: Now that I see what a completed page looks like on screen I see I've got much more work to do to make it legible. I'd planned on posting the finished pages on this blog but I think I'll need my own domain name. That means more expense but after all the work I'm putting into this thing (30-40 hours a week) I want to show case the work in a quality way. Setting up web sites is relatively easy these days but I'm not yet ready to launch something new.

The Characters Are Taking Shape

The last few days have been a blast creativity-wise.

The first draft of Ecclesiastes U contains many, many pages of word balloons each of which are filled with dialog. While writing that dialog I had no clue who the speakers were. I wrote without specific characters in mind. It was a stream of consciousness process. I’d read a phrase from Ecclesiastes in Mr. Q’s word balloon, then reflect, respond, and riff on each phrase, writing down my rough ideas like mad and eventually typing them into the Publisher template of six panels per page.

I'm now sorting through and categorizing those word balloons according to speaker. Some word balloons are best suited to the hedonist; others are best suited to the scientific materialist. Some to the Teacher’s Assistant. In the first 40 pages I’ve come up with 11 or 12 main categories of comment meaning I’ll now have 11 or 12 main characters.

Here’s a pictorial survey of the convoluted process of creating words before pictures.

Here's page 11 of the first rough draft; speakers of each word balloon are unidentified

I drew a dozen or so random cartoon faces using a brush pen; the final drawing
will be rendered in Micron .05 pen and then colored with Prisma Color pencils.

I cut and pasted those faces onto sheets for easy clipping

I scotch taped faces to appropriate word balloons in each panel (pages 1-40, so far)

FYI: The guy in the first panel is Mr. Q. Panels 2, 3, and 6 is a rapper (Hispanic or black, haven't decided yet). Panels 3 and 4 is a cartoon depicting the Teacher's Assistant. As mentioned, there's no guarantee the final characters will look anything like this. 

I was always under the impression one created characters with values, histories, temperaments, and idiosyncrasies first. Then writers put those characters together in a variety of situations and let chemistry do the rest.

I on the other hand reversed the sequence. I first juxtapose the philosophy of Ecclesiastes with the musings of university students. This in turn creates reactions of puzzlement, anger, outrage, confusion, humor, and so forth. And then finally, to make sense of those reactions, I isolate the speakers according to character.

Here’s the challenge: Those thumbnail sketches look nothing like the final character, size, gender, age, facial hair, hair dos, or attire. Their facial expressions are inert and they’re all talking heads. The finished product will include wide angle shots, long shots, close ups, facial expressions, full body action (in a classroom), and color. These thumbnail sketches are useful to distinguish one speaker from another but I am working hard not to allow these pictorial references influence how the final characters will look.

This is all wonderfully complicated. If there is an easier way to create graphic novels I don’t know it…which is understandable. I’ve never drawn one before. 

Finished Section 21 (9:11-10:3)

That wall I just mentioned hitting (see last post) continues to put up resistance. I created 23 strips but two are incomplete. I included a "slide show," I deconstructed verse 11, and I staged a violent fight that breaks out between students while Mr. Q babbles on. I'm not sure if these surreal shenanigans are the result of brain fatigue or inspiration.

The point of this post is to mark the completion of chapter nine; 40 verses to go.

In reflecting on those initial character thumbnails posted earlier, I'm reminded that I'm going to not only draw this guy a lot but I've got to look at him constantly for months so I better find his face appealing, interesting, and engaging. I do not find those quickie sketches anywhere near done, but drawing them was a good change of brain power and they helped me finish writing the text for that section.

These posts will be so much more interesting when I can insert more drawings. Please stand by.

Adjunct Grist for the Mill

It's very hard for me NOT to start drawing yet. The delicious anticipation of seeing how pictures will enhance, change, and challenge the dialog is what eggs me on. It's like building a brick wall but making the bricks first. The shape of the wall will be determined by the number and shape of the bricks I create. But these bricks are living in that the dialog informs the character AND the character will inform the dialog. But as I said, I'm making myself write a first draft of the dialog before character development.

I do have rough ideas of who the students will be. There will be philosophy majors of course (since Mr. Q teaches in the philosophy dept). But there will also be pre law, marketing, English, and science majors. I also get to throw in players, materialists, Tea Partiers, aging hippies, hedonists, home school students, and computer gaming geeks. Mr. Q will have a TA, useful to me as the one to elaborate on Mr. Q's more confusing utterances.

Earnest Hemingway will make a cameo appearance (quoting his book The Sun Also Rises, taken from a line of Ecclesiastes). I think I'll refrain from putting in Timon from the Lion King saying, "It's a circle of life sort of thing," since animals in the class room is a bit too far fetched.

Yesterday I took a one day art class just for the fun of it and the 20 year old kid teaching it (a fabulous artist, by the way) was covered in tattoos and wore a hooligan hat. Here he is sans tattoos drawing on a Cintiq tablet and interactive pen.

The class, all 20 somethings, wore beanies, hoodies, and tight jeans. Since I'm an old guy unaccustomed to schmoozing with students 1/3 my age (I'm almost 60), I jotted phrases the teacher used which I hope to put into the mouths of the students in my graphic novel. The list included these gems:

Crappy
Do you want to know my truth?
I'm gunna be raw, honest, real
I'm like Simon Cowell, brutal and honest
Go crazy
Knock yourself out
His stuff is insane
There's good pizza and bad pizza
The music of the Black Keys is awesome
I sell tee shirts
It's really cool
I know, it's retarded
Good on you

Not sure how many of these I'll use but they'll come in handy, I'm sure.