Freestylin’

Recently, I have been producing one-page comics in my lovely cheapo sketchpad:

I just start drawing something and then try and dig myself out of the hole I quickly get into. For example, with this one, I started drawing this crying giant thing that i’ve drawn a few times, and the Giant Giant Panda which came out of my other sketchbook (which is even rougher than this one), with a basic idea that they would fight.

 

I drew directly in Brushpen so was committed to all the lines & errors i’d be making, but so be it. In Panel 3, having written “Let us do this thing!”, i still had room in the speech bubble, so I wrote the word ‘Poom’ which made me laugh, so I decided to make the rest of the strip about that. The drawings go well off-model, but for such a stupid strip I couldn’t be bothered to pencil it out and get everything looking exact. You get the idea, and hopefully the laugh, and this is the point of these really, just get an idea down and share it, without it taking ages to produce. I drew all the panels first too, so i was going to struggle to stretch the idea out to 9 panels, so the word Poom seemed the ideal endpoint.

Next was this one (above), and i started with the idea of this little potato man suspended in liquid, but struggled a bit with a punchline, but eventually it presented itself. I coloured it with coloured pencils again, but it looked a bit crap so the sandy colour was added in photoshop.

This one didnt really come together until panel 5, where i drew the big monster, but it didnt really look like it flowed with the previous panel, so i tried drawing another one and was going to split the panel up, but then it became obvious that there was more than one monster jumping, which luckily led to the last panel. The brushpen was a bit too restrictive with this one though, so i decided to change it up for the next one…

So changing the rules a little bit (my rules, so who cares?), I used a 5B pencil, and gave myself the luxury of a bit of rubbing out if strictly necessary. I quite liked the pencil, and again the punchline could have gone a few different ways, but I think this is a nice little wrap up without explaining too much.

So mixing it up again, i tried a bit of coloured pencil, and again I used characters I had drawn but not done anything with before and decided to see where it goes. I started off with a bit of a downtrodden Fargo/ American Beauty character in mind, hence the bit of narration, and from there it wrote itself….

I’m enjoying knocking these out, they only take about half an hour to do and they’re nicely self-contained but get me thinking about utilising the panels on a page and being creative within the parameters i’ve set myself. Maybe one day I will draw the better ones of these out if I’m really bored, but I think they work for what they are, and spending hours on them wouldn’t necessarily enhance the small enjoyment that they might bring.

Try it yourself, and I’ll see you next time….