I started by writing bullet points of ideas for short stories. Things that I found interesting and could symbolize being othered. Riffing off of my friends and peers helped me a lot in this stage and was also very fun.
I then went on to drawing out these ideas in storyboards. It was very hard to start because I've never made a story from scratch but I just went for it a drew a bunch of boxes and got creative.
In this workshop we had a run down of how to use Adobe Illustrator. We went through a worksheet made by Nicky, and learnt about text, masking and manipulating the text. It was quite simple but I had a bit of fun making a page layout based on shrimp. I am hoping that Nicky will teach us about drawing on Adobe Illustrator as that is something that will be useful for me in the future.
In this tutorial we talked about storyboarding my comic and using big paper to get some ideas out of my head. If I get ideas out now I won't be so stuck and I won't worry about it so much.
Ceri also brought in her crazy dip pens (like big and jagged ones) for us to try out. It was quite fun having a little workshop alongside our group tutorial, and the dip pens made some cool patterns and lines that I could use in my work later on. They were a big more applicable to text and fonts, so Ceri also let us go through some books with lots of copywrite free fonts (which could be useful later on so I scanned some).
Yes my main character resembles me... But I don't want her to actually be me. I am the easiest reference to draw from. I am also female representation and a different body type doesn't have enough representation in the media.
I am also a badass and a horror fan which is the demographic. hehe
Nicky ran a workshop focused on the design principles (basics of graphic design), which I have touched on before in my Graphic Design A Level. The design principles are very useful for composition and the balance of a design, they are a list of things you can use to express certain things.
We used these to draw some thumbnails based on a theme. We brainstormed the theme and then applied the design principles to our work. Nicky also gave us some collage materials which I had fun with.
I had to think about the setting of my comic. At first I made list of interesting places for a zombie apocalypse, such as carnival, haunted house, big city, amusement park, graveyard, cowboy town, movie theater, zoo, uni building, etc. It depended on how I wanted the tone of the story to come across because I think they are all fun and gimmicky (possibly locations for other spin off stories), but I wanted the story to be more relatable. So, I thought that the easiest and most relatable place would be where I live right now, as I would be able to take reference pictures myself and work from my experience. So I decided that I would take my camera with me to the Eldon building and on the walk I would take pictures I could use to draw my comic.
I wanted my main character to have set up bunker in my current house so that I could use our living room and the view to the street outside. The street I live on is very much a student housing street and I just thought that it would probably be the worst place to be in a zombie apocalypse (because students are known for spreading illnesses).
After a lot of InDesign and colour printing troubles, I was able to print a nice copy of the final product. I will need to print more to se...
