Filed under: breaker's end | Tags: art, cartoons, comics, graphic novels, illustration
It’s been quiet on this blog for some time now since I’ve been focusing all my attention on drawing Breaker’s End, which, after working on it for so long, has reached a sort of critical mass and is being propelled rapidly to completion.
After creating the first chapter for Myriad‘s First Graphic Novel competition last year, I had to spend a long time working on the story and producing a full rough pencil draft of the book, but now I’m fully in to the phase of producing final artwork and in a couple of months, it will be complete.
I’ve taken on a lot of influences for this book, studying other artists and writers closely for the effects and techniques they use, such as David Small’s extremely loose, ragged, and oh-so-powerful linework or the warm, heavy quality of light in paintings like A Philosopher by Lamplight by Joesph Wright of Derby.
I became particularly enamoured with a Monet painting; Towing of a Boat. Squint at the image and you’ll see how he’s created one big, very dark shape on the left which defines the whole image. No matter how much you squint you can still tell what’s going on in this painting, and I realised this should be used more in comics; figuring out what big shapes define the scene in each panel, and then using that to communicate what’s happening in the story.
You can read chapter two and chapter one and a bunch of other stuff in the comics section.
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Corban Wilkin: Illustrator 