Casting your graphic novel

When I get a story to illustrate, I read through the story and my mind takes me places, I imagine the environment and characters form the text and start to populate that world with characters.

If designing the world is a mixture of research, location, set building, dressing and prop making. Then creating the people that live there is like casting, only you draw not chose your actors.

These are character designs first laid down in pencil and then inked to cast the young boy first at about 8 years old then as a young teen for a story set early 1800’s

Once the casting is in place then its a matter of getting them to act, as in when I draw the story panels that feature the character reacting to the world around them.

Narrative Storytelling And Working With Schools

I’ve recently been working with secondary school pupils at St Brides School in East Kilbride with Magic Torch Comics. For this project we are taking excerpts from children that fled Germany in the 1930’s and relocated to the UK.

Key to the learning is to allow the pupils to find their own way through the story and share my experience of illustrating graphic novels. To get them infer from a story’s text, what else could be said and making their own choices in how to best visually tell the tale. .

The short version of Isi Metzstein’s account of how he experienced Kristallnacht was prepared to work with. The two pages you see here have been inspired in part from the classes own work. In my most recent session with the class my two pages inspired from the collaboration was presented to them for feedback.

As the project progresses I will be creating the full version of this story and a another by Dany Metzstein. These stories told as visual narratives will be an important part in telling these important stories to younger people.

Both will be available to read for free at Magic Torch Comics for schools and anyone else interested.

These interviews can be found here and tell of the horror inflicted on these young lives.

Creating Graphic Novel Artwork

Telling a captivating story with pictures is a love of mine and I’m always thrilled when I get a commission to create illustrations for a new visual narrative. The draft and finished page below has been taken from Goliath a story set in 1967 and the year 2000.

As much as I hate to admit it the year 2000 is now firmly in the past and this novel is essentially two period pieces within one story! So the look of both times needs researched and delving into the past to get the look and feel right can be it’s own time consuming rabbit hole if you let it. You get an immediate satisfaction if you get it right. I think the trick is not to pick out too many obvious examples from the period as this especially in the case of fashions can make the feel characteristic.

First I start by reading the story, I let it percolate a bit in my mind and play it out in my imagination like a film, thinking composition, point of view and pacing. I try to trust my intuition and find that if it feels easy to draft down on the page then I’m doing it right. After I might go back into it and do a little refinement before illustrating the final page.

I still draft my rough pages by hand and you can see I have a love for using colour pencils. This draft stays very close to the final page, you will see a little refinement here and there only. The finished art is hand drawn in pen & ink then scanned. I use a layer with textured paper to help soften the shade I add to give it a wash, water coloured feel which I think helps adds to the period look.

I used greyscale with some colour to highlight elements for the 1967 time period and used colour for the year 2000 parts of the story so the reader knows when exactly they are at a glance.

Goliath. Draft page and Finished art comparison. All my illustrations are hand rendered in pen and ink.

ILLUSTRATING NARRATIVE

The fun of Illustrating a book is sitting down with the story and imagining what the characters and the setting will look like.  Sometimes the outline is descriptive but still open to interpretation, other times I've got free reign to come up with ideas and solutions.  My task is to visualize your text and enrich the experience for the reader by first sending you the character design illustrations for feedback and then getting to work on the interior draft.

Below is the opening chapter and my illustration, hand rendered in pen and ink to accompany it.

Allow me to introduce myself -my name is Lawrence Pinkley, I'm a private detective. There aren’t
many eighteen year old detectives in Whitby, in fact, I'm the only one, but not by choice. I found myself pulled to the cold north east of England following the death of my father, when I unwillingly inherited the Pinkley Investigation Group, or PIG for short.