QUT Semester 2 Image Production (DXB202) Week 3 Inked Drawings - Comic Panels - #oneperday2018
Technique -
Pencils and Inks
Process -
For this week's task, we had to create a 5 panel comic that retold an event from our days in school. It had to be created with black ink, so I stuck with a 0.4mm Artline Fineline pen after sketching the roughs beforehand.
The true event that I used as reference was something that became a bit of a running joke back in high school. One rainy morning, some students entered the storm water drains at our school, and were seen by the groundskeeper who alerted the school and authorities. Unfortunately, he didn't realise that the students emerged very soon after on the other side of the drains, and immediately went to class. This meant that emergency services were still arriving at the school and entering the drains in search for the students - keep in mind that there was a lot of rain. After hours of searching, they found out that the students had been in class the entire time, and called off the search.
To be clear, this event did NOT happen to me, it was just an event that happened while I was in Grade 12 that stuck around as a running joke for a long time, and was one of the few things I could think of to create a story for. I am not the kid in the drawing, but I decided to simplify the story down to just one student being visible as the focal point, since it may have been confusing to have drawn six different students all entering, and making it clear to the reader who each one was and what they did. If you want to read more about the real events of the story, there's a news article right here.
When making this comic, I did a lot of concept sketches and designs in my notebook for the characters, environments and panels. I also tried to incorporate as many different pen techniques for communicating shapes and shadows, such as hatching, crosshatching and stippling (best seen in the very last two panels, for instance).
Reflection -
Overall, this was pretty fun to make! I'm not too experienced or skilful with drawing smooth, inked lines, but I enjoyed messing around in my notebook designing the look of the characters and thumbnailing my story ideas for this comic. I feel that my skills in terms of inking could be better, and would have made for a much better looking comic. Using more exciting framing for the panels (instead of just basic grids) would have made for a more visually appealing design. In the end a lot of the problems come down to my existing skills surrounding drawing and design, and they are things that I am trying to improve.
Because it may not be clear, I'll break down each panel below.
Panel 1 - Kid enters the storm water drains before school starts. Groundskeeper sees this in the background.
Panel 2 - Groundskeeper reacts with shock
Panel 3 - Groundskeeper alerts the school without realising the kid has already exited from the other side and is going to school.
Panel 4 - Kid is sitting in home room (which we called 'Connect' for some reason in high school), bored and waiting for the day to begin.
Panel 5 - News broadcast alerts that there are emergency services currently investigating the drains for him (and others that I didn't focus on), and he suddenly gets very sheepish because he knows that they've wasted their time because of him.
