The Medium and Methodology.

Most professional illustrators will probably always face the dilemma of working through client orientated briefs so that they can fund their own private projects. Some may hate having guidelines and deadlines, i'm sure the majority would rather work on their own ideas where they have complete creative freedom, but there are pros and cons to both types of work. I can relate easily, I imagine its similar to university, getting projects and trying to create my own graphic novel at the same time, however I quite enjoy getting briefs because the type of work is usually completely different to what i would be usually doing. In the professional world, continuously receiving different briefs with different goals and styles would definitely expand your skills and experience, not to mention you get paid. On the flip side, personal projects can go on for a lot longer and, in my own experience, they are much more satisfying to complete. You created the idea from nothing and developed it into something real.




The first piece is from  my comic that i have been working on for almost 3 years, reworking and changing because it's been developing in my mind for so long. The second piece is from our current uni project, a collaboration with 3 other students, I am much more proud of my comic page because it's my own creation, even though i like the second one more.
One of my favourite artists Hu Jingxuan, uses deviantart.com to promote her work, she puts her own projects online to accept critiques and show her work to a wider audience. She is not allowed to put her published work on the site, so she promotes her comic through similar art. This is an example of how using different mediums can affect your work and your target audience.

One of her pieces on deviantart, because i found this and was impressed it lead me to her page where i found out more about her work. Just by putting one piece on a website she got one more fan and over 150,000 people have viewed her page...

Every piece of work, the way it is created is unique to the artist, but everyone has a design process, this is called methodology. I have a very basic system that's not very effective if i'm honest, hopefully learning from others will give more structure to my own. This is a key part of improving. I begin with an idea, then i start to sketch and give structure to the idea, because i don't spend a lot of time planning, i look at the piece midway and decide if i like where it is heading, I can usually tell half way if the piece is going well or not, half the time while i am drawing i get better ideas and incorporate them into the piece or stop there and work on the next, better idea. There have been projects of mine that i have repeated 4 or 5 times, maybe more because each time i get a better idea or view of the design in my mind. This style suits me because ideas flow better for me when i'm actually hands on drawing, but i know if i did more research i could probably come up with a better idea straight away. There is no right or wrong way to do this but it's a given that the more information you have about your subject the easier it will be to create. When i go about doing pages for my comic the process is quite straightforward, supposing i have already thought about whats going to happen, i'll write bullet points marking the important actions in a scene, then i visualize in my head how many actions i can fit into a panel. Then work out how many panels to fit on the page. The next step is to draw a little thumbnail version of the page, and then finally draw the illustrations.

 

The final version changes slightly but sticks to the thumbnails generally, if i'm not happy with the page i'll redo a thumbnail and try to visualize how it would look completed.