A look at what goes into creating a Graphic Short Story (with LOTS of photos)
If you’ve been following me on Instagram recently you’ll have noticed I’ve spent the past couple of months working on a graphic short story for a competition run by the Guardian/Observer/Comica and Jonathan Cape, the publisher.
Here is a look at all the work that goes into the creation of a fourpage comic, that you can read here.
The results of the competition are not yet in, but I’m not holding my breath. Winning the competition was not what interested me. It just came at the right time. A time when I needed a small constrained project to focus my energy and attention on. To help me test some assumptions I had. Assumptions about not only my artistic and storytelling abilities, but more importantly about re-entering the commercial world with my newly honed drawing skills. Since becoming ill a few years back I have wound down all commercial activities but I’ve never been able to silence the little voice in the back of my head that whispers about the many ideas I have for visual stories of varying scopes.
While I’ve never been a huge fan of the traditional superhero comics, over the past couple of years I have become increasingly interested in the relationship between text and visuals and how they balance on the page andexploring how you can really add value by combing the two in interesting ways to achieve what neither can do on their own.
However, if I was ever going to fufil this desire, I had to get started on creating, on doing. On making the shift from opinionater to preactioner, to becoming the ‘Man in the Arena’.
It was my first attempt at a proper comic, albeit a 4 page one.
Since finishing the graphic short story I have decided to explore the idea of expanding it into a longer graphic novel and to maybe even start looking for a publisher.
As I [recently] pointed out in my Manifesto for 2017 I am committed to documenting the process. So where better to start than taking a look back at what was involved in creating this graphic short story.
If, in the final days of polishing off the comic, you’d asked me what I’d be doing now it’s finished I would have inevitably envisaged taking some time off and just relaxing. Although it is only 4 pages long it has taken a lot out of me. However, I still feel the momentum. Ideally what I like to be doing is working on expanding the story. However, as you can see I am physically incapacitated sitting with a neck brace with my wrist all strapped up sitting in my custom-made workspace using speech recognition software to write this up. If nothing else, it helps to keep the momentum going.
While there is a degree of self reflection(and some may argue indulgence) in writing a piece like this; I genuinely think there is real value in sharing the process and the learning experience as soon as it is happened to the individual. This is something I heard Derek Silvers mention on The Tim Ferriss podcast and it really resonated with me.
So here goes, here is the truth behind the creation of what turned out to be a short and slightly above average artistic endeavour.
Deadlines were tight but the rules were very open. Simply create a graphic story with as much, or as little text and visuals, black or white over four pages.
My short story revolves around a trip I took last year driving from Ireland to a refugee camp in Serbia to meet up with some friends. My friends NGO, The Timber Project, were in the process of building a children’s centre in a small town called Kelebija, in Serbia on the border with Hungary. From the very start I decided I would draw the the whole journey. At the time I was inspired by George Butler’s reportage illustration, a term I had not come across before. As well as the graphic journalism of Joe Sacco.
The good thing about this project was that I had a lot of information to draw from, in fact probably too much.
So, I started by sitting down with all the sketches from my trip to garner inspiration:
Now that I knew the story would revolve around the trip I had to find an angle, an interesting angle that could be told over the four pages.
Throughout the trip I’d taken extensive notes. So next, I sat down and went through my notebooks and dictaphone.
Since returning I had published some posts that were getting good traction on Medium and I turned down the opportunity to write an article about the journey for a National newspaper here in Ireland.
However, the difficult part was in narrowing down what was almost a month of intense experience to just four pages.
That’s where I invested most of my time up front sketching out the ideas that came to me in a cheap sketchbook.
From scribbles to a finished drawing, with a few wrong turns along the way
A number of themes emerged but in the end I focused on a central theme of the children of the crisis and what they were going through. Interestingly, a number of smaller themes emerged visually as I got to work. Which was interesting to observe.
So when I was sitting back at my desk in Cork the good thing about it was I had a catalogue of reference images to draw from. I just had to weave them into a narrative.
So I did what I always do in the beginning and just started scribbling in my sketchbook- a cheap sketchbook is where all my ideas start, fuelled by coffee and wine:
And sometimes over a beer while travelling:
Quickly enough the story started to emerge and the structure of the four pages that I started with at the beginning remained largely intact.
I’m not by nature a very organised person, so as I reflect back on this process now, I realise I have thrown out a lot of pages but the majority of them were indiscriminately thrown into a simple folder.
Though throughout the creation my organisation system looked more like this. Piles of paper on the floor loosely arranged around the four pages.
THE PROCESS FROM SKETCH TO FINISHED PAGE
From the sketchbook scribbles to an a4 sketch to play around with proportions:
Then I transferred this on to an A3 peice of news print paper as this was going to be the final size of my entry.
Then I worked on getting the lettering right, as by this point I’d realised I’d just be drawing it out by hand. It was around this time that I started to realise certain elements weren’t going to work out due to space limitations.
The whole time I was sharing my progress on Instagram:
It’s funny to think but at this stage still didn’t know 100% how I was going to draw out the story, what style I would use.
Throughout the process of learning to draw I have deliberately played around with many different styles.
Its interesting, as I sit writing this I’m beginning to realise that this inability to commit to a specific style is actually one of the reasons that has held me back from creating or more accurately starting on a bigger graphic novel.
The initial drawings that I did on the journey were 90% ink and wash, using fountain pen, a water brush and sepia ink.
This looser style started to emerge as it seemed to convey something important. This drawing of a child in Dunkirk playing in the rain and puddles was one of the first in this style. Previous drawings I had the privilege of taking my time to sit and draw. This was drawn in the rain just before he ran away.
When I first got back for the trip I just posted all the drawings unedited, untweaked on Medium; and one of the most interesting and consistent pieces of feedback was about the style. The drawings presented a softer, kinder portrayal of refugees in comparison to the relentless images of refugees in the news
I really toyed with the idea of drawing the whole comic in this style, but as I sat with it just didn’t feel right and I also questioned whether I had the skill to control the technique in comic form.
Next I really wanted to draw using a brush pen. However, brush pen that I use for small details ran out of ink and can no longer be purchased or re-filled. I did try a DIY effort but that failed pretty miserably.
Without the variety of brush pen I just didn’t have the skill, or perhaps more accurately the confidence, to pull off this images that I wanted at the scale I was working.
In the end, given the tight time constraints I settled on using the tried and trusted Micron fineliners.
So I got to the point where I have most of the short story mapped out, what I was going to draw and what I was gonna say if not the specific words then the general sentiment. In some instances available space was the constraint that forced me to edit what I was saying.
In some instances I already had the images I knew I would use. This was the actual drawing I drew on the ferry, that made it into the first page.
I also came across drawings I had done previously that fitted the mood and the story. BONUS!
As you can see from the date on this one, I did this a while ago. It was actually as part of going through Betty Edwards book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.
Drawings that I had done when my daughter was born became relevant as the theme of children emerged and were weaved into the narrative:
There were other drawings that I had done to document my own experience and posted along the way on Instagram:
Once I had everything loosely sketched out I started to turn to the Adobe suite- namely Photoshop and Illustrator.
While I have been drawing for a good few years now it is almost always been with pen, pencil and paper. Whenever anything has been digitised it’s been working in conjunction with a designer, or just simple case of tidying up
So, this was not only going to be an opportunity to learn about art of comic meeting, it was also a great opportunity to get stuck into Photoshop and Illustrator.
I had to toyed around with them for some smaller projects’ and I understood the difference between vector and raster-based programs. However, I also had a lot of misconceptions.
I started off with creating a font of my handwriting as I wanted the piece to have a personal, almost diary feel to it. Though it was quite a simple process once I stumbled upon Calligraphr, it still required a lot of tweaking.
While I knew what I wanted to do, translating that into actual results proved harder than envisaged.
I planned to create the panels and text in Illustrator, exporting them to Photoshop which would become a layer and act like window for the art work to show through.
However, it proved to be more difficult, or more accurately time consuming to actually do.
The next problem I faced — underestimating how much Photoshop could reduce a drawing while keeping clarity. This seems obvious to me now but this is one of these things I had to just learn the hard way.
As I moved closer to the actual drawing of the final images I started first working them out at large scale.
I played around with vectorising the images in Illustrator but I just didn’tthe style. While it worked for some of the images, it also clashed with the style that had emerged.
While I couldn’t use the drawings I was able to scale them down the right size and use them as a reference for the final drawings.
This literally meant measuring the rough size of the image on a piece of A3 paper {include a picture] and reducing the image in Photoshop to that size. I did learn later that this is not the best way to reduce an image in Photoshop but rather to do by percentage, but this doesn’t matter so much as I was just looking for a rough outlining to schedule to speed up the process.
Cheating- this probably has to go after the fact that I realised I was going to be drawn by hand.
I wrestled with some of the drawings, sketching over and over never capturing the essence of what I wanted. I tried all the skills, tips and tricks I’ve learned to conceptualise them and get a realistic drawing or at least one I was happy with.
I started off taking photos of the position I was trying to achieve and sometimes this worked fantastically:
However, for some I still struggle so I started to use Paper 53 on the iPad to quickly outline a sketch captured the gesture required. Making sure to the sketch and as possible and to go into his little detail as was needed.
I then produced this sketch in photo shop printed it off. These then offered the foundation for some of the drawings to work with.
I know that there are purists that will frown at this process but do you know I don’t care!
I guess in my heart of hearts I would like not to have to rely on this process too much in the future. If nothing because it slows down the speed I could work at, but it’s all part of the learning process.
All of this digital process was going well and I was really enjoying the learning experience. Then after a trip to Belfast for my cousin’s 21st birthday my body failed me and I was out of commission for almost 2 weeks. Then as I started to feel better and capable of drawing again I made the decision to work on the present for my one year old daughters Birthday rather than the comic.
The countdown is on
The long and short of it was that after all this I only had a week to go before the deadline. That just wasn’t enough time for the learning required to get everything done digitally not to mention the uncertainty around the printing off at the end. While Photoshop is incredibly powerful tool does have a rather steep learning curve.
So I made the decision that I would just stop messing about in Photoshop and stick with what I know and draw each page out by hand. This began six days before the entry had to be posted off, so I gave myself one day per page and then the weekend to de everything Sunday off.
Page One
It definitely added a level of stress as I didn’t have much scope for mistakes at this point. There were some that could be corrected with good old Tippex and a few that just had to stay in there.
However, in the end I got them finished:
Thanks for reading, if you have any questions please don’t hesitate to ask.
The next step is to document the expansion of these four pages into something longer. You can follow my progress on Instagram or sign up below to get email updates and more in-depth behind the scenes, in the moment.
