Personal work/projects

When I spoke to Ben last week about worrying about 504, one of the things that came up was how I sometimes focus on or prioritise my own personal work.

I have a lot of ideas for graphic novels or longer comics, and I have multiple Word documents with notes, ideas, timelines and character lists etc., that I occasionally add to whenever I get a new brainwave. Something John said in one of the PPP lectures was that great ideas take a long time to form, and that's basically what's been happening with all my ideas for stories. They all stem from one idea, be it something someone said to me, a snippet from a blog post on Tumblr, or just something I overheard on a bus, but they all started as small ideas (lots of them from years ago), that have gradually picked up speed (some more than others) and become larger and more well-formed as the months and years go by.

I can go weeks without thinking about the story but then I'll get a new idea and it'll be added as a new story or a snippet of an existing story idea I have to form a larger story.

What got me thinking about this was when I said to Ben that in my sketchbook I write a lot of lists and diagrams - my sketchbook is a lot more wordy than some people's, but that's just how I work! That's how I tend to think through ideas - through writing and lists and mind maps.

Anyway, over summer, for our summer brief (draw every day), I decided to focus on one of my story ideas and work on character development for characters I'd already pictured in my head.

This particular story (I don't want to actually reveal it lest someone somewhere see it on my blog and create it before I ever get round to it) has been changed and moulded over time, particularly in terms of the love story angle - as I've grown up and become more aware of issues in cinema and other forms of narrative, my tastes have changed and my view of what I think my target audience (primarily inspired by what I myself would want to read) would want to read has changed as I've had new experiences.

But, moving on, here are some of the drawings I did over summer:

I wrote a blog post on my Studio Practice blog in July about struggling with my own visual signature (link here), which you can probably see in the drawings here, but this is the kind of personal work I'm doing at the moment, and the kind of work I want to be doing now and in the future. Obviously there's still room for improvement and a long way to go before the character development stage is complete, but just a snapshot into what I'm doing outside of uni!