ROBOTS, FISH, etc.

batchix:

swegener:

Last week I posted about making comics of varying size. Because my artwork is so minimal I’ve come to believe that the traditional 11”x17” art board is too big. Not only is it more artistic real-estate than I require, I also often find that it forces me to draw at a scale that I am very uncomfortable with. Thus, in some cases it hurts my art.

That might not make much sense to some of you. Allow me to explain.

Making comics, like any task that requires fine motor skill, is about 90% muscle-memory. Meaning you do something over and over until you don’t have to think about it anymore. Drawing very small things requires certain movements from your fingers and wrist. Drawing large requires movements from your elbow and very few from your fingers. In other words, entirely different bundles of instructions from your brain need to get interpreted correctly by your body, even though the thing you are drawing looks the same in your mind’s eye, regardless of how large your illustration.

Because I mostly learned to draw while I was supposed to be doing other things -paying attention in school, participating in meetings at work, etc.- I tend to draw small. Because I learned to draw in the margins of notebooks. :P

This is all secondary to the point of this post though. I shrank my work space, and I love it. Not only is the size of the page much more comfortable for me now, but I also accidentally created a new margin to doodle things in when I should be paying attention to work. LOL

Actually, I’ve been using the extra space to draw my thumbnails for the page, work out difficult panels, or work through design problems before committing them to the actual page. Also, I get to draw all messy with a pen, which I love!

Above is a finished page from the next volume of Atomic Robo, along with it’s sloppier cousin.

When I no longer have to worry about spoilers I will post more un-cropped pages focusing more on the thumbnails and doodles than the actual finished pages.

I’m glad this is working out, and that the extra bits of the page are so handy -I was a little worried about what I was going to do with $600 worth of 11”x17” bristol board. :D

PS: the other 10% of making comics is talent. If you ain’t got that, don’t waste your parent’s money on art school. Seriously.

I work small for the same reason.  I do all my work on traditional sketch book with smooth paper.

Also, you can cut down the 11x17 board at kinko’s.  They have a cutter that will go right through that mother fucker and make it whatever size you want.  I used to have a lot of fun cutting up big stacks of paper and then playing with the binder… or better yet the glue we used to make paperpads.