Sequential Art™
Comics, both web and traditional, have been a fascination of mine for some time. I wasn't brave enough to try my hand at creating them until I made a discovery during #inktober 2017 - the best way to get over the fear of drawing is to use bold drawing tools. I started with pencil, transitioned to pen, and eventually cracked open a marker set. My resulting illustrations were as brazen as the drawing tools I was using.
Last year, I decided to use this technique to draw some panels. I posted my first comic as a reply to @JamesInks, a talented comic artist, as a gag. I believe I was planning on replying to a bunch of tweets with comics, but I only ended up posting two in this way.
The second was in reply to a tweet about pie.
After this, I started a thread that now includes 19 short comics. This first one, Sequential Art™ was meant to be a light-hearted jab at the self-seriousness of some comic artists.
I tried my hand at social commentary for my 4th comic, Sequential Stress™. These panels ended up being featured in Owen Williams' (@ow) article entitled, “Notifications are broken. It's time to fix them.”
At this point, I was attempting to create at least one comic per day, so the subject matter turned to trivial things I was dealing with. Like bugs.
And exercise.
There was a third panel here that turned out bad, so I cut it off. I enjoyed this two-panel reaction shot enough to post it despite that.
Most of my comics didn't warrant a title. Perhaps this one didn't, either, but I decided to include it for some additional context.
My son and I take pictures of our silly faces sometimes.
My hairstyle was in transition during this time. I did a few quick studies to nail how I wanted to portray it on the page.
While simple, this is the first one where I played with the perspective. Perhaps a sequel is warranted, “honk.”
The goal of this study was to illustrate butterflies at various levels of resolution in interesting ways. Note that they become hearts as they fade into the distance.
Again, hair transition issues.
Here, I attempted to portray a simple thing in comic form that couldn't happen in reality.
Using line thickness and texture, I created a biopic about our RoboVac.
After a brief hiatus, I came back to comics with a fresh perspective on my previous panels. I had become too careful, and it was time to loosen up a bit. This cat comic could be seen as a more feral version of the original “MAKE COMICS” strip.
These few comics were illustrated around Halloween 2018. I drew the candy witch, a witch who trades a toy for candy.
I also found the idea of an angsty pumpkin hilarious.
This started out as a hand study, but resulted in one of my favorite strips - more realistic with multiple perspectives. There is a nostalgia to it, as well. I haven't gone fishing in years, if not decades.
Back to the Halloween theme, I thought it would be fun to illustrate a dragon - with a twist. It was my son's costume all along.
Finally, too much caffeine!
I had a lot of fun with these, and I hope to do more. My main takeaway from the project is that I can (and should) impose constraints upon myself to yield the results I'm looking for. I wanted to create quick, rough comics - the best tool for the job ended up being a big ol' Sharpie (and a few other markers for color). Many of my comics are bold and dynamic because it's hard to do otherwise with the tools I was using. That wasn't an accident.