Road to a [Horror] Comic: Week 9-10

Good morning (well, I’m in the UK and it’s 10am at time of writing, but you could be anywhere in the world, or reading this at any time, so I suppose that was a pointless opening).

Welcome to another week of drawing! I’m still combining the drawing with the writing, and am currently working on:

‘Parklife’ – the working title of my first novel that I aim to see through to completion (2 others written, but not edited)
two new short stories – one about a photocopier that copies the user, not the documents and another telling the story of being contacted by a medium, from the point of view of the dead person
a longer story that a friend has dubbed ‘Apocalyptic Tesco’ and is an interesting take on the future
revamping and rewriting the Spennyriver Dispatch – the newspaper from a strange town in the Midlands, UK that is definitely NOT Nottingham.

Oh, yes, I’m also working on turning one of my short stories into a comic strip. I’d love to put a date on when that will be ready, but I’m still in the ‘learning to draw’ phase as you can see from below, so I’d be guessing at this point. I could put a deadline on it (which can often be a good tool to motivate), but at the moment, I’m enjoying the learning and as I have no one breathing down my neck to get this done, I want to enjoy the process!

This Week’s Progress

When I sat down to look at what I’d achieved this week, I struggled to find a theme that would connect all of the images. I wanted to start looking more at the facial features, as they make a surprisingly big difference to a finished piece, but I appear to have meandered off somewhere along the way.

Again, I feel this parallels my writing somewhat, in that I can get side-tracked and move onto other projects (see the list above), but I think that’s okay to a certain extent. Whilst it is important to finish a project, I have found that veering off every now and again enables me to keep my enthusiasm.

Eyes are tricky. Do I say that about everything? So I wandered back to what I was doing last week, and tried to revisit some older faces that were all bald and try to add some hair to them.

Well I did a few of these and realised one thing: I have an awful lot of heads with no hair! I am going to say that I am happy with my profile drawings (of male heads only – see last week), I just need to draw more of them to become better. The hair on the guy above is passable, but I feel I need to master more than one hairstyle, and although I lived through the eighties and early nineties with a mullet, there are many other styles apparently!

So, on to the next theme change…

Hands. Simple little things. Four little tunes sticking up and another one point out from the side. Wrong. Just like reading a great writer and thinking ‘I can do that,’ hands are not that easy. Sure, I’ve drawn a few examples that would pass as hands, but not many, and drawing anything other than the postures you see above is tricky (that word again). The answer, like anything, is more practice. Now I just need to find a couple of extra hours in the day and a cure for this MS fatigue…

For some reason, at this point, I slipped into anime style. I think it’s something I would definitely like to give more time to, because I am a big fan of the style, but for now, I want to get back to what I had been working on – somethings a bit more ‘realistic’ (in quotes because…have you seen my drawings?)

For my last entry this week, I present a page a scribblings I did yesterday. I started off trying to work on drawing the female body, but like everything…it’s tricky.