Filed under: comic artists, comics, graphic novels | Tags: animation, art, books, cartoons, comics, graphic novels, illustration, sketch, writing
My graphic novel project with G. Neri has been in progress for a year now. The end may or may not be in sight, however.
I’m actually now redrawing a number of early pages. I started drawing the book at too-small a size, and I decided I wasn’t happy with it, and reformatted to a weird paper size I’m cutting myself (I’m envious of US paper sizes, since the standard formats we get here in the UK never feel quite right (or maybe I’m just that picky)). So I knew I needed to come back to those pages. Since I’ve had something of a deadline extension, I’m able now to go over some of this huge project and spend a bit more time on what’s be
en some truly tricky drawing.
In addition, I’ve been writing a ton of comics short stories, which has been a lot of fun.
Redraughting and drawing them up is a different matter, though. That’s the curse of comics: it’s all so time intensive, but I’d love to find a way to draw my comics quick n’ dirty in a way that works. At least I’m not an animator.
Currently obsessed with: Toulouse Lautrec’s sketches and drawings. He’s very much an illustrator’s fine-artist. Drawings have to have outlines or my puny mind can’t make sense of them.
Also: Scott McCloud’s The Sculptor. Which I’ve read about four times now and may be the most novel-like comic I’ve ever read. Nothing else I’ve seen by a single creator is as successful as this at giving you the scope and depth of a novel. I understand it divides opinion, mostly due to the kitschy nature of the eponymous sculptor-main-character’s art (according The Comics Journal, anyway), and I’d noted that, too, but in book on this scale, there’s bound to be criticisms of some elements. But the thing as a whole: wow, it’s a great comic.
And that’s Corban’s totally-late-to-the-party review.
Filed under: comics, graphic novels, illustrations | Tags: animation, art, cartoons, comics, graphic novels, illustration
In addition to writing and roughing the ridiculously long and totally gotten-out-of-hand graphic novel that I’ve been wrestling with for some time now, I’ve been doing some work recently with Stargazy Studios, doing character illustrations and frames and even some level concept-design for smartphone games. Take a look at Stargazy Studios’ portfolio page to see some cool stuff.
Below: scattered with abandon across my studio floor, we’ve got some pencils for game-character frames on the left; to the north-east we have just a few of many-(many)-hundreds of pages of notes, thumbnails, and sketches for a story; and in the bottom right: horse-drawing practice.
Since there isn’t really a place for it in my portfolio, I thought I’d upload this animation here.
This is a piece I created in 2010 called Playing Sandwiches and illustrates the Alan Bennet monologue of the same name. The voice is by David Haig and is taken directly from Alan Bennet’s Talking Heads television series.
Aside from that, the animation is all by me, drawn with a brush and black ink on 350 sheets of A5 paper! The grey texture was created using big, dirty splashes of watered-down ink.
In other news, you can read my new comic for younger readers, Rock-Bocking and I’m working on completing my graphic novel Breaker’s End, as well as several other projects which I will post more about when the time seems appropriate.
Corban Wilkin 