Managed to find a little time over the last few days to lay out, draw, and ink a page in The Project. It has been insanely busy for me, so this is a little bit of a triumph in stealing some time back. It’s actually the same seminar that you saw in earlier posts (here and here). Now it is over. It remains a tradition in our field to give a little round of applause after a talk, which I find rather nice and quaint. It was a pleasure to depict that.
It is a wider view of the room, which meant (aaaargh!) drawing even more faces and bodies than before. Then there’s the challenge of doing them in different states of attention, applauding, with different faces, bodies, states of dress, etc. When I come to paint it I’ll be wanting to pick colors that together communicate the right mood for the panel and for the whole page it is part of, and so forth. It can be daunting to do all those faces, bodies, shirts, feet, and so forth, but the fun thing is that once I get started, an interesting rhythm can get set up and the faces keep coming. Often the starting strokes determine where one is going accidentally, and off you go on that particular person.
Ironically, many readers who read graphic novels super-fast by just hunting for speech bubbles will simply turn this page in less than a second since there’s no dialogue on it. Such is life. It is an entirely silent page, but silence does not mean that there’s no information being communicated.
-cvj
I love this.