October 24th, 2013

Our protagonist fancies herself an amateur photographer. There's no official backstory for this nameless girl. However, while drawing this story last year I assumed that she was an inquisitive but bored kid who's pretending she's on an expedition shooting photographs for National Geographic.

I've already written about most of my artistic process for this story. One further experiment that's worth taking note of is my choice of paper for this story. Grad school is an experience that encourages a person to question their artistic decisions. I'm very fussy when it comes to materials, and I was challenged to examine the importance of what materials I use in my artwork. Did I really need to use archival materials? Did this decision make the object too precious to me, instead of focusing on the idea I was trying to communicate?

I actually ended up using plain computer paper to draw this comic instead of the fancy archival papers I prefer. Drawing a story about a middle school girl on cheap computer paper had a nice resonance with the comics that I used to draw back in high school -- which of course were created with graphite pencils and computer paper. The experience was pleasantly unprofessional and certainly broke down some personal barriers, although my method of coloring destroyed any indication of the naive method I was using. There's no way for viewers to know that the original pages were drawn using a method I'd originally used as a child due to lack of better resources.

I think that there's a seed to what could be a very powerful story in this idea, but I haven't quite cracked it open yet.