Antique shop - finished version

It is the last day before Christmas break and I decided that my antique shop is finished.



20 Lines a day

Last week we also got the assignment to draw an A5 drawing using not more or less that 20 lines. This is an exercise that had to be done in 15 minutes every day of the week and our teacher Matt Madden has done it himself for a year.

  

99 Ways to tell a Story

"99 Ways to tell a story: Exercises in style" is the title of a book written by the American cartoonist Matt Madden who was our teacher this week. He gave us five assignments (each per day) that were all based on his book. We practiced some difference ways to tell the same story. Matt gave us a very simple script, which we had to use for our template comic of 1 page. In the script there is a character in a classroom sitting drawing. Another character enters the classroom and the first character gives his drawing to the second character and says: "She's all yours". 

    

My template comic: 

We all got a genre, which we had to base our next page on. My genre was: samurai. Here the things we had to focus on was characters, costumes, props, types of stories, visual style/atmosphere and historical precedent.

We had to change the perspective or point of view. I drew the classroom seen from a closet.

The newt assignment was to pick an artist, cartoonist or illustrator we wanted to copy and then draw our template in that style. I chose the Norwegian cartoonist Jason, and used the characters from his comic "Vent Lidt".

  

The last assignment was really fun to do. Here we got 3-5 obstructions from a classmate - A class mate made a list with some rules we had to follow while creating the comic. This type of assignment was inspired by a Danish documentary we watched in class. The documentary is about the Danish film director Lars Von Trier who gives Jørgen Leth obstructions while creating a new version of the film "The Perfect Human". 

In this assignment my obstructions were: 

Only digital 

Silhuet (black/white) 

No frameboarders 

Only three panels/tears 

Adventure/magic genre (witches, trolls etc.)

Perspective week

This week we had another drawing class with Lawrence Marvit. 

The focus was on perspective, construction and rendering.

 The first assignment was to design a Atlantis weapon. Mine is a shell-gun which has poison sea urchins. Incredibly fierce.    

We continued the Atlantis-style with the second assignment, which was to draw an Atlantis environment in perspective. Drawing in perspective is something I have tried to avoid more or less my whole life and this week it went clear to me that I am not the only one who have had that feeling. It has nothing to do with perspective is boring - it has (as Lawrence so nicely expressed it) something to do with our fucked up little brains. 

Anyhow - I had some issues with horizon lines and vanishing points and stuff like that. I have to work on that while I say to myself: "Perspective is NOT math". (Something that was discussed this week as well). 

The next thing was a two day-project where we should draw an A4 Antique shop or a science fiction laboratory in perspective. Not very surprising I chose the antique shop. First we should draw it only in lines. It is the first time I have been drawing an interior. In perspective. In Photoshop. So yes.. even though I am not 100 % happy with my results this week was a big thing for me.

  

 

I have always wondered how people manage to create paintings digitally but now I am way much closer to know how it works. Because I tried it myself. Thursday we started rendering our interior pictures, which is a long, slow, but fun and exciting process. I am far from done with my picture but I will work on it. This week I also got introduced to a new expression, which shortly means that I need more time to finish the picture. But the fact is that I am "bitch-slow". This was a fun week.



Photoshop

This sunday I spent some hours with Photoshop and my Tablet, which I am trying to figure out - long process. I had a lot of fun experimenting with colors. I used some of my sketches from croquis and tried to "spice" them up a bit.

Croquis

Thumbnails

This week we made thumbnails for our 20-page stories using the manuscripts we wrote last week. Thumbnails are a sort of a storyboard where you go through your story by making very simple sketches showing the most important elements in each panel. We were taught by the Danish cartoonist, illustrator and author, Palle Schmidt. 

Script writing

The last two weeks we have been working with the stories we started on during the scriptwriting workshop with the screenwriter Barbara Slade, some time ago. We are all working on our own individual stories, which each is going to be a 20-page comic book and has to be finished in the beginning of 2014.

My story is a tragedy and is about two brothers who are working in an orange plantation in Argentina in the 1930’s. It is going to involve a lot of drama and… violence!

During these two weeks we have had focus on the writing process and in the first week we had the Danish scriptwriter Merlin P. Mann teaching us in outlining. By the end of the week we handed in an outline, a synopsis of our story and we could also hand in some character-sketches, which I did.

The second week we started writing our scripts with the Danish author and co-writer of the Danish “Valhalla”-series, Henning Kure. We had to write the scenes step by step and one panel at a time.

This week I explored how helpful a script is and how much you get to know your characters and the focus point of the story when you are in the process of writing a script.     

By the end of the week we got the opportunity to hear about Henning’s work with the “Valhalla”-album “Ormen I Dybet” from 1991, which was really interesting.

     

Drawing Class

Last week we had a drawing class with Artem Alexei who teaches at the Drawing Academy. We practiced figure drawing using ink, pencils, and markers. The whole week we drew a model who was posing in different time intervals. 

Thursday we got a quite special assignment. The focus was characters so we were told to dress up in some clothes or accessories that created a character. Each person had to be in the same posture for 7 minutes and we could choose any tool we preferred to use. I used a brush, a nip pen, and ink.

First I made the silhouette and then I drew the lines with the nip pen. 

Friday we went to a local mall to draw. The assignment was simply just walking around with our sketchbooks and draw people with focus on characters.

Design week 1

Last week we had the first design class with the concept artist Lawrence Marvit. 

Monday: We got the first assignment, which was to make a black/white A4 landscape consisting of 3 boxes at any size and 1 line. They all had to be at at an angle of 90 degrees and could not touch each other. The composition had to be as dynamic as possible. 

Tuesday: Was all about lines. The assignment was: Describe the taste of chocolate with lines. The description had to be based on an experience from our own life.  My direction was: Swimming in black, warm water while being hit by a cold stream.  

Wednsday: The assignment was to make an A4 landscape using the colors black, white and two tones of grey. This time we had to describe the sound of Miles Davi's album "Kind of Blue" by creating a composition of shapes. Again it had to be based on something from our own life. My direction was: Walking to my friend's house after having had a quarrel with him.


 

The last two days of the week were spent on creating a A4 landscape, again in black, white and two tones of grey using both lines and shapes. We got the theme "Circus of the Dead". This week meant a lot to me - for the first time EVER I drew a whole picture on the Wacom board. The result is of course pretty simple but the process making it was really great.