Con's comic workshop

We were introduced to a professional comic creator and artist, Con Chrisolous. Who had done several biographical, and satirical comics in his career.

He was going to show us the benefits of quick and experimental ideas with characters, the importance of the 3 act structure and how to digitally colour on photoshop.

We started off on an drawing exercise, which in my opinion was the most disliked part of the workshop.

It did start out fine, we had to sketch 3 characters, the protagonist, the side character and the antagonist.

But it got difficult when asked to draw they in a cartoony style/situation which was difficult as I had already drawn the characters in a cartoony style beforehand.

The time limits for each page got shorter and changed from drawing them in a slice of life, western, fantasy etc. It got so frustrating because half the time I was just trying to think the ideas as opposed to putting them on paper. I just wanted to run away at the end of the day.

This wasn't helped by the fact that we then told to do a strip of the fantasy characters in 9 panels showing the hero's journey, the story trope in which the character goes through a change from the beginning with the help of a wise old mentor and facing the antagonist at the end.

I decided I wasn't going to do that and I was stressed out too much already. So if you want my opinion, I did not enjoy the first workshop, even if it was meant to be taken lightly.

These 3 pages are all I managed to sketch of the characters in the time given, this does not include the slice of life and western.

The second and final workshop was about re interpreting famous/iconic characters, we were given monsters, a superhero named , greek myth and pinocchio. I chose the monster of the invisible man because I did want a bit of a challenge this time, but just enough that the time wouldn't be too short and I could just design it with the details I wanted. This was significantly less stressful.

The final parts of the workshop involved creating two comic panels of a script given to us.

Gutter Magic by Rich Douek PANEL 1 Interior of a wizard’s laboratory we can see the large, open window behind, and the line trailing to the building across the street. The laboratory is full of odd, esoteric items, like an armillary sphere, alchemical equipment like distillers and beakers, old magical tomes, and parchment scrolls much of which has been rummaged through already.

CINDER BYRNES holds one such scroll in front of his face reading it with narrowed eyes. He’s wearing rugged leather gear with a pair of steampunk­-style goggles around his forehead. Several charms with mystical symbols dangle from his neck, and on his belt, he has a long revolver holstered on one side, and a short sword on the other. Behind him, BLACKTOOTH, a goblin, is appraising a globular flask http://bit.ly/pTk00g of dark, swirly liquid. Blacktooth is the size of an adolescent human, with large, pointy ears, bushy eyebrows, and a set of sharp, pointy teeth that are black around the gums. He’s also dressed in leather, but wears a long cloak that conceals some of his gear. He carries a shoulder bag that is already full of potions, scrolls and other magical treasures.

CINDER: They’ll spend a fortune warding themselves against every spell in creation...CINDER: ...then forget something as mundane as locking a window. BLACKTOOTH: Hmf. Its a wonder all this stuff is still here for us to steal.

PANEL 2

Blacktooth has uncorked the flask. He wrinkles his nose as a fine black mist wafts up from the open mouth.

BLACKTOOTH: Eurgh. BLACKTOOTH: Find what you’re after yet, Cinder?

As you can see we had to hand draw the panels ourselves, I only got round to roughly completing the first panel though, which was quite big already.

And unfortunately when it came to the digitally colouring the techniques shown to us were handy but were told to us at the pace of a cheetah. So I barely remember a thing which resorted me to filling out most of the completed panel with a paint brush in photoshop.

Overall I am very conflicted on the workshop, the tutor was interesting but the practise was stressful, and some of the info given at the last section was too fast to even remember or practise.