Cartooning III
Cartooning III concluded earlier this month and I've finally gotten around to scanning in my 3 major assignments for the class. There were fewer assignments this semester than in Cartooning II but that's because more focus was lent towards each individual project and less exercise-orientated.
Project one on the left was our first and only reproduction this semester and we were instructed to reproduce specifically either an anthology cover or a comic book cover (complete with all insignia). I was highly encouraged to do Ronald Searle's cover for "The situation is hopeless" after bringing it into class. The original can be viewed here. Of course my reproduction is not exactly like the Searle original but overall I feel I learned a lot about technique through this exercise, especially noting the difference between illustrations that are contour or "line-based" and ones that are colour or paint based and how much emphasizing one over the other can affect the drawing.
Our first original assignment, seen in the middle, was an anthology or comic book cover of our own design, and we were also given the option of using the cartoon characters we've been developing since Cartooning I or going in a completely different direction. I really struggled with the assignment, despite how much I wanted to do it. I felt the lecture emphasized too much on action comic book covers and I felt really confused by what the teacher wanted from me, especially not being a big fan of that particular genre. I thought that maybe abandoning my hippie characters for this assignment might move my creative flow but it just sent me further up the creak without a paddle. Restless, I decided to return to my hippie characters and devised to create a kind of psychedelic cover for my imaginary anthology. Unfortunately my colour scheme was also kind of off and too washy for what I wanted to achieve. The example posted is actually the image at high contrast and high saturation to allow a better idea of what I would have liked to achieve.
And last but not least, our full page comic assignment. This was also a struggle for me but fortunately this came out a lot more successfully, I think. Again, we were given a very self-directional assignment, with only tips and examples to glean ideas from. Every stage of this was hard-- the writing, the character motivation, the composition, the angling, the colour scheme.
There were minor squabbles in class between me and my teacher over how lazy my male hippie should really be. In the end, my teacher won. I originally had my male hippie coming home from somewhere and my teacher exclaimed that that was just too much action to bestow on that character. I guess he's just one lazy hippie.
And oddly enough, I have a lot of the furniture featured in my comic so it wasn't too hard to imagine what their home would be like.
I can't fathom how people create many of these pages to actually create a book but I imagine it must get easier with each page and also as you get to know your own characters. One of my friends liked it so much there was suggestion of continuing the comic for regular posting on her website, so who knows, I may get used to the process after all!
Cartooning IV will not be offered in the fall but will resume in January '08. In the meantime there may be fewer posts on here as I shift my focus to art history at UofT, but I will continue to post any paintings or studies up here, so check back every so often.
Also, when I get myself more organized, stay tuned for work from my Cartooning I and II courses.
Cheers.