I won my first ever competition!
1st Prize in the over 18s Category :D
Just after completing my JC/Observer/Comica Short Story Prize entry 'Bottled Up', I began on this one page Thought Bubble Comic Art Competition entry:
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| Larger image can be seen HERE |
My comic was perhaps one of the more subtle entries in terms of art style and colour - in comparison to some of the other bolder, monochrome comics. It was lovely to see such an array of different styles and media used within the one page constraint.
As usual, being quite self critical, I can see a bazillion tweaks/changes that could be addressed, in particular the type of font used (should be a more hand-written style?) For web purposes, I'm also tempted to extend the length of the page from it's A3 format and rearrange the title and first chunk of text so they can sit centrally on the page. Fitting in all the text was also the issue with 'Bottled Up' and it's something I need to consider more in future comics.
Although I'm happy with the final visual outcome, I'm most pleased with the overall idea of the story (and that I managed to fit it into one page!). I wanted it to be bitter sweet at the end and my idea was for an almost mirror image/symmetrical layout that meets in the middle (inspired by my early work 'The Cimaruta Stag'). This worked well for a simple one page comic as you can see the gradual progression of the characters coming together without a page break in between.
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| Sketchbook - planning frame layouts |
Rather than draw the whole page out, as I did in 'Bottled Up', for this comic I drew everything in bits so I could more easily re-scale the characters etc. to fit inside the narrow frames on Photoshop. I then coloured and textured (as is my preferred technique) and voila!
Originally I was refraining from going to TBF as I've been to 3 comic events this year already but
I was offered a free ticket to the convention in Leeds for the Sunday to receive my prize in person and as it was my first competition win I decided I had to go! I was pretty nervous as I didn't know what the prize giving involved (and whether I'd need a speech prepared!)
In the end I had nothing to worry about as it was just a case of seeing our entries displayed on screen, being called up to the stage and being presented with lots of Travelling Man loot!
The rest of the day I spent looking round, chatting to lovely comic folk and yet again spending too much money!
A blog post will follow at some point outlining all the festivals I've been going to - and all the the awesome hauls from each event!
Below are some of my scanned-in characters that were then arranged and coloured to create the final comic:
Originally I was refraining from going to TBF as I've been to 3 comic events this year already but
I was offered a free ticket to the convention in Leeds for the Sunday to receive my prize in person and as it was my first competition win I decided I had to go! I was pretty nervous as I didn't know what the prize giving involved (and whether I'd need a speech prepared!)
In the end I had nothing to worry about as it was just a case of seeing our entries displayed on screen, being called up to the stage and being presented with lots of Travelling Man loot!
The rest of the day I spent looking round, chatting to lovely comic folk and yet again spending too much money!
A blog post will follow at some point outlining all the festivals I've been going to - and all the the awesome hauls from each event!
Below are some of my scanned-in characters that were then arranged and coloured to create the final comic:
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