A New Medium for Me
From paper over to Paper and Over
I have wanted to create comics since I can remember reading them back in the Sunday newspapers — when they were on actual paper.
For me, I loved coming back to The Family Circus, Marmaduke, Blondie, Beetle Bailey, Garfield, Hägar the Horrible, Ziggy, B.C., Peanuts, Andy Capp, The Lockhorns week after week. And then later in life, it was The Far Side, Calvin and Hobbes and Rehabilitating Mr. Wiggles.
I can draw. But having more of a way with words, I never considered myself a good enough “artist” to draw my own comic.
I begged artist friends to collaborate with me as far back as the time before Facebook. Then, when social media came, I had even easier access to old friends and newer ones with artistic talent and I kept asking. And dreaming.
Enter: Medium. A place where I have gotten back into writing (as detailed here) on a consistent basis. Here on Medium, while I pluck away at writing silly things and more serious things, I have also discovered many artists who have taken to the platform to share their work.
I proudly point to Chaz Hutton ⚔, Nate Otto, the plethora of artsy folks here at Panel & Frame (rstevens, Cecilie Q and Rembrand to name a few regulars) and — my most recent find — Martino Pietropoli. The latter (creator of The Fluxus) I can partly blame for my recent leap of comic faith.
Browsing through the Italian artist’s profile one night, I happened upon a response from someone asking him what he used to create his daily works. Very matter-of-factly, he replied that he used Paper (53) to draw and then added text using Over. I had used the second app before, for making graphics and adding words to images. I knew vaguely of Paper (I recall seeing its popular Pencil when shopping around looking at various styli*) but never really checked it out.
(* Sidenote: I have been dying to use the word “styli” in context for far too long. Thank you.)
Time on my hands, I downloaded Paper to my iPad—which is really my wife’s, though mostly a vessel for my daughter’s learning games these days. Also: the DisneyMovies and Disney Junior apps with occasional ventures onto YouTube (for the Mickey Mouse Disney Shorts) and Netflix (for “Anna Birthday” aka Frozen Fever) — all of which we Chromecast to our TV.
Using my fingers as my stylus, I began to explore the app’s tools and play around with them all. Maybe drawing silly things for my daughter on her Etch-a-Sketch-like magnet board or her chalkboard have afforded me some more courage, but this app does wonders towards amping up my art self-esteem. The interface is so user-friendly and with each stroke I felt better and better about my abilities. Not to mention: there’s this wonderful “undo” button that allows you to erase your last stroke (and every one before that); a perfect feature for a budding (fledgling) artist.
It hit me that I had this turn of phrase sitting in my drafts on Medium waiting for me to use somehow. It was a playfully silly wordplay that made perfect sense to me when seen through the perspective of an ant. I could draw an ant.
Ants are easy. Three little ovals, six legs, two antennae. Throw in some simple lines for eyebrows and a nose. Dots for eyes and a mouth. Done!
Then, another bug idea came to me. A Google search for a list of insects (to make sure they were in the same class of the animal kingdom) provided a wonderful image gallery of characters to populate my whole new world.
And thus insect inside was born. And an artist too.
If you like what you’ve read, be sure to hit recommend below, to pass this story along to your followers! As always, consider following Panel & Frame for more emerging voices in Comics, Literature, Art, and Film!
