The Best way to get Good Ideas.

A Comic Strip

Rough for a comic…

I’m reading a lot of children’s books

Everything from picture-books, chapter-books, kids graphic novels and middle grade books. I feel that is helping my authoring. There’s a lot seeping in that I can’t quite articulate. maybe that’s the best kind of learning. I’m learning through osmosis.

A rough comic

Rough is a technical word in publishing. It’s a stage where everything is placed and all the ideas are ironed out, though there may be edits. The next stage is the Finals or the colors. I’m offering today’s comic to you in it’s rough form. If you like you can be the editor, spot the typos and suggest improvements, go ahead, leave a comment. If I get 10 comments, I’ll work on them and finish this comic next week. (Otherwise, you get another rough)

Process

I mentioned earlier that I have been reading. It takes a significant effort to plan reading time into a day to get any meaningful reading done. It’s the same with making comics, you have to put aside the time for it, that’s the hardest part.

The ‘punchline’, is not intended to be funny but educational.

I tried to capture the mindset of a child when drawing the comics, the idea that I can draw anything, there was little struggle, just putting the work on the page. This is a look inside my sketchbook to see the idea emerge.

Once the punchline was done I needed some filler content, that was interesting in it’s own right, and characters to deliver the lines.

The little grid in the top right is me working out the pacing of the strip. And the little doodles on the top left are important for the style of the work.

What am I going to do with all this?

I see this work as material, some will need to be thrown out and what is kept will likely need to be worked on further. The material can be expanded upon or edited down. Right now I’m at the phase of generating ideas.

I’ll keep at it and keep getting better, and at some point, I’ll pass a pile of these to my agent and maybe we could develop them. Or an editor will reach out. In the meantime I’ll just keep doing my practice.

And take classes

I’m taking a few short classes next month by Jonathan Hill related to comics. It seems we’re coming to a new age of direct apprenticeship. It’s becoming so easy to learn specific skills from actual partitioners

And Book Club

I’m excited to meet up with a book club today to discuss October, October . It’s such a brilliant book to be reading as the seasons change. Physically there is little change in the weather for me. But being plugged into a global community, you can feel the seasons and how it affect’s our culture. This is very noticeable around Christmas time but if you pay attention, you can also feel the shift throughout the year.

Particularly as an illustrator, appetite for work changes with the seasons.

Till next week…

How do you get ideas? I hope you have lots of good ones! Thanks for reading, if you can afford it, please subscribe. It helps me do this, but it also unlocks a bunch of extras for you!