Hey guys,
I'm turning 38 later this year, and I finally started working on my very first comic! I think it's been about time, given the fact that I'm a comics fan since being a young kid. Technically speaking, I even made some before…drawing comics about my teachers at school were my unofficial first steps. So let's say: first comic in my professional art career. I also hope the new one won't get me into as much trouble 😂
Mirrored Dreams
If you already know about the Mirrored Dreams project, you might want to skip this part. For everyone else, just a short intro to what the comic is about and why I am drawing it: My friend Dominik and I recently started our own publishing company Gooey Goose. We felt the urge to create a roof for future human made art projects - and the first project is going to be a book called Mirrored Dreams!
For this book, we invited 10 artists from all over the world to illustrate dreams and nightmares. Not just our own ones, but the ones our community members sent to us. Everyone picked their favorites, and currently the artists are working on turning the dreams into visuals. And of course, Dominik and I also picked ours. My goal is to make 2 short comics for one dream, and one nightmare.
How I approach the new challenge
I think this fresh task is a great opportunity to take you with me into the process, and show you how I approach this challenge. Comic as a medium work different compared to single illustrations, however I've always been into storytelling. So what I'm going to try is combining my usual workflow and existing storytelling skills with the different medium that a comic is.
My dream & nightmare
I picked two very different stories, as I wanted to have a strong contrast between the dream and the nightmare. Here are the original submissions:
I dreamed that I was in a gigantic bamboo grove, I got up and started walking aimlessly, until I came across a lake where there was a woman white as snow and with long black hair, dressed in a long dress and colorful silk tunic. She danced on the water, I walked to a nearby pier, and the next thing I knew, it was my spirit that was walking on the water towards her while my body rested asleep on the pier. We danced together and I felt happy, like I hadn't felt in years. Before she left, she gave me something and asked me to take care of it, and then she dived into the waters of the lake. Looking in my hand, it was a seed carved with spirals and a fish. I ran back to my body and decided to go back to the bamboo grove. Walking through the bamboo trees, I came across a Japanese-style portal, and the image through it was of a night city, full of color and lights.
I was lost in a strange fantasy futuristic city, everything seemed different, everything seemed slightly distorted and I fell into a hole because I couldn't keep up with the advances in technology. The problem is I couldn't get out of this world because I was trapped.
I had a dream where I kept waking up into another dream. I was aware that I was in some kind of loop, and every time I thought I had finally woken up to normal life, it turned out to be another dream. I was afraid that I would get lost in the dream forever.
The third one is a "bonus nightmare" that gave me the idea to connect my stories, so I decided to add this as a kind of overarching story.
Sketchbooking: finding a rhythm and vibe for the dream
As a first step, I opened up my sketchbook and just wrote down my thoughts. Mainly about how I thought the story could unfold, and also what visual elements could and should be visible to explain what's happening. I also did some visual research and added my favorite references to the sketchbook.
In the next step, I started dividing the story into pages. I know this process from layouting books and magazines, and something I learned from that is that rhythm is a very important aspect - visually, and in terms of storytelling. I feel like there's lots of similarities with comics, and I paid a lot of attention to this when reading comics lately.
Specifically, what this means is that you control the pacing of the storytelling, and the tension between pages. If page layouts, perspectives, panel sizes are very similar over several double spreads, chances are that your rhythm fades out. Same with storytelling: a story has to unfold, follow an arc, create tension.
To keep control over this, what I do is a page overview masterplan:
This is the plan for the first three double spreads. It looks a bit messy with some references and notes thrown in, but it contains the most important information: what can you see on the pages, what are the main story elements, and what's the rough layout?
I'm planning with six double spreads for the first dream, and I'm right now in the middle of building the page masterplan. It's a constant exchange between ideas in my brain, my sketchbook, and surfing for references, and I enjoy it very much!
So as you can see, this is all in a rough state. But I feel like this is the part of the process with the highest level of creativity, and where both inspiration, but also cold hard planning and organization hit the most. So I wanted to share this with you already, before I'll send around some more polished sketches in a few weeks. 😊
Have a great weekend, cheers!Stefan