I’ve been slowly working on my graphic novel story and comic strips over this year. My goal is to publish in 10 years – hopefully before my fingers lose their agility and my sight deteriorates.
As I went through the various phases of design, I got stuck in the craft so often that I realised I needed to invest some dedicated time to learn the skills.
So a few days ago I designed a Comics workshop for myself, and it was a blast! Learned a lot in the process too. My goal was to complete 5 strips of varied lengths, but I only reached 2. Still I have a list of ideas to work on further.
A book that has given me immense joy is Making Comics by Lynda Barry. While she herself is a big inspiration, her books are inimitable and exceptional. Ms. Barry teaches drawing and comics to young children and this book is a set of those exercises and her unique insights around drawing, imagining, and teaching. I’ve often done some of the exercises with our little tornado and his friends when they needed to be calmed down, and soon we are all giggling at each other’s drawings.
Here’s an exercise where she asked us to imagine ourselves as Batman, and draw what we did the day before. I had gone to the Aadhaar Centre nearby, worked from home, and went for a walk with a friend.
Ms. Barry also believes that anyone can draw, and so do I. My drawing wasn’t anywhere near the best in design school, and in the animation studio where I interned, our boss had despaired over my unfit-for animation drawings. He used to challenge me to do 20 iterations of bird flight cycles, or 50 iterations of floating balloons, and I persevered. All by hand, of course.
What happens through repetition and practice is that you get better by training your hand to follow your eye or your mind’s eye, as closely as possible, without any gen loss. The repetition also allows your conscious rational mind and your ego, to quieten, and you’re in flow until there are just the forms on the page…
“There’s the drawing you are trying to make and the drawing that’s actually being made – and you can’t see it until you forget what you were trying to do.”
Lynda Barry, Notes from an accidental professor
If you think you don’t know how to draw, this book is for you. Ms. Barry starts with basic stick figures to help you start envisioning. She also says,
It’s not your job to judge whether your drawing is good or bad, your job is to keep drawing.
Where does your artistic voice comes from? It’s your story – and your story could have anything, from memories, obstacles, truths and morals. It’s important to know yourself and listen to yourself – even though it hurts. And also, hours and hours of craft and expression so the craft becomes part of your body and your expression can break through. the journey to finding your voice comes with a lot of risks and failures – but trusting that you will always find the way to your voice.
We don’t often hear about graphic novels written by women. It’s not that they’ve not being made, but it’s just the usual process of whitewashing over women’s achievements by simply writing them out of history. We’ve all been there, in corporate work culture you would have heard of it as the Matilda effect.
It’s not that I have anything against Seth, or Guy Delisle, or any of the other authors we hear about. But sometimes we all like to be reflected through media. It validates our existence, it makes us feel seen. It universalizes us.
Mimi Pond is super funny, as I heard in this podcast episode; and so is Posy Simmonds with her biting commentary on British society. Julie Delporte ingenuously talks of some universal but not often articulated concerns with the challenges of motherhood and creativity.
inktales 