I have a personal principle about illustrating characters.
Characters are meant to be instruments with which you play a story; they are the puppets of a narrator. When I see illustrations of characters without a deeper story, I find myself grasping for more. Where are they? Why are they there? What are they doing? Who are they? These are questions that I ask about my digital paintings, far before pen meets paper (or in this case, pen meets tablet). There is always a story to be told, even if it is only a fleeting moment, shared between the characters on the page. Even a single character, alone, can weave a tale for the observer. This is what I strive to do for every painting I complete. |
Read right-to-left.
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Along with story-ful illustrations, I also take time to draw four-panel comics, full-page manga, as well as some other experimental presentations.
Growing up, I was infatuated with comic strips like Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes, and I wanted to learn how to tell a narrative with pictures. One of my earliest attempts at doing this was with a character lovingly named 'Moodboy', whose horns(?) were as expressive as his face. As I grew older, I began reading more manga, like the classics: Doraemon, Astro Boy, and many others; as well as more adult-oriented comics like Dilbert. I began picking up on the patterns of humor - the way a joke was formed, told, and maintained across multiple strips. I learned how to distribute content on a page to keep it interesting without cluttering it. I continued to experiment with drawing comics and manga throughout high school, getting practice by utilizing pre-existing characters and figuring out how to write a good joke. |
For example, here is a series of four-panel comics that are consecutive. While the content is wildly different in each strip and the timings themselves are staggered,
(in 45, the plane is thrown on panel 3; in 46, its thrown on panel 4; in 47, it is not thrown yet) there is an obvious rhythm that I maintain across all three strips that succinctly:
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Aside from four-panel comics, I've also experimented with shorter three-part illustrated short stories. These are usually exercises for me in managing pacing, character development, and viewing planes, as the four-panel style restricts my illustrations to more minimalistic scenes.
I also use this format to test out new story concepts, as it allows me to be more dynamic with how I arrange the story and how I want to build up suspense. By restricting myself to three units per page, I am forced to carefully choose which moments are important to highlight, and where they fall on the page to elicit the greatest reaction possible. Of course, as my art skills continue to improve, my ability to illustrate these stories grows stronger every day. |