Blog from Nov. 10

For a good majority of this semester I plan on creating (and eventually publishing) a graphic novel. Currently, I am working on the novel with my friend, Selena, because honestly drawing the entire thing by myself would be a bit too much in addition to writing and planning the entire thing myself. We’re currently in an early stage of planning, meaning we’re essentially planning story, characters, etc. Originally, this project started as a means for my best friend Saul and I wanting to make a graphic novel during our freshman year, but never quite having enough time to make it, so naturally I decided on making it a project in this class. I talked to Saul about it and he sounded moderately pumped. I also asked my friend Selena to help because I knew how good of an artist she is. However, Saul would not tolerate anyone impeding his great work of art, and said she couldn’t work on it. Since I was/am the boss of this project since I’m the only one turning it in for a grade, so I had to change that. I asked Selena if she would just prefer working on another story altogether, and she was elated. We currently plan on making the graphic novel à la Japanese manga, that is to say, the Japanese cartoon art style and right to left pages. However, the art style we decide on when we actually start drawing will be decided based on genre, story, characters, mood, and other things of that nature. The projected time for planning/writing/any other pre-drawing activities is set at two weeks as of now, so until the twenty-fourth. Also, the projected time for storyboarding/drawing/inking/publishing is also set at two weeks, so around the eighth of december, both of these times are extremely variable as writing might take a longer or shorter time based on how long the initial story is set to be/last. And drawing time is variable due to the currently undecided art style. Selena and I have been designing a character for the past few days, including personality and physical appearence. The character’s name is currently Miya Redde, she has red hair and red eyes, if you couldn’t tell before, the color of things being red is going to be a key aspect of the story. Speaking of the story, we’re going for something surreal. What I mean by that is a story that possesses wonder and mystery. However when most people hear surreal they think balls off the walls acid trip, this kind of artistic chaos isn’t really what we’re hoping for. We want something that’s sort of an inbetween of the aforementioned acid trip and a somewhat odd dream, something that can easily conceal a hidden, subliminal message, while not completely detering itself from readers with its seemingly storyless randomness. Why we decided to create a character first and go from there with story was so that the genre’s style would be the thing changing and not necessarily the main character. If that sounds confusing (which it probably does since my syntax can be odd at times) what I’m trying to say is, we want a character to act a certain way and not be affected by certain situations. Since we’re going with surreal and a character that acts a certain way, we only have set amounts of ways to represent our surrealism, as in for our story the surreal parts of the story don’t actually take place in the medium in which the character dwells, thus the character affects the genre and the genre, to a lesser extent, affects the character. For this week itself, I’m going to create a setting and immerse myself in it. With that, I will write the lore of that world, and from there the story. Also we are going to finish the concept art of Miya we have already started, and finish Miya herself as well, her character. Additionally, we might mess around with art styles if I get far enough in writing.