SEQA 375: Environments, Props, and Structures
This class is a classic. David Gildersleeve was my professor, who is also the original creator of the class. He seems to be the quintessential teacher to take this class with, so it was obvious to enroll in it. There are plenty of assignments, but I love doing lots of work where a lot of it is left up to the artist. There is a lot of research and reference-shooting done for this class, so come prepared with a camera or 24-hour internet access! I loved this class, the other artists brought their A-games, and I had to bring mine, too!
Project 1: Savannah Building
I was very pleased that my first assignment came out this way. We went on a field trip and took plenty of pictures, so I had lots of reference under my arsenal. I gave a lot of attention the pipes in the foreground and the blinds, and the rest was just fillin in the page. I had a vision of the kind of character I wanted to draw. I had a Mediterranean guy in my head with a huge nose with a similar look to how French artist Rudolph Guenoden draws himself in comics. It came out exactly how it was in my head (which is pretty rare for me). I even drew him in the exact angle I wanted.
Savannah seems to come up in almost every SEQA class at least once, so drawing from life wasn’t too hard. After a while, you just start drawing the town from your head because you know it so well. You don’t just realize what landmarks or recurring images are in the town, you know the feeling too, and are able to incorporate the emotion of the town into the drawing as well.
Project 2: Character’s Room
We drew a stereotype out of a hat. I got beauty queen. For the first day I was stressing out what a beauty queen would have in her room that wouldn’t just label her as “teenage girl”. I did some creative things with this by including mannequins with all her sashes on them and a sewing corner where she can alter dresses herself. It’s more of a working beauty queen who doesn’t have everything just handed to her because she’s beautiful. But maybe that’s why she sort of looks like a man? Because she doesn’t just win competitions on her looks alone, she works hard at doing what she does.
And there I go! Telling myself stories to get into this character’s head and find out what would be in her room. A lot of my classmates found themselves doing the same, enveloping themselves in their characters lives and adding details that could only be found by digging deep into a personality. It’s an exercise in being creative and not just relying on what’s on the surface of a stereotype/occupation to find what else you can throw in their personal living space.
Project 3: Crowded City
For this piece we had to include a busy metropolitan city rife with men in matching suits, a Paris Hilton-type girl, a cub scout assisting the elderly cross the street, and a man in a banana suit handing out fliers. For most, at least one of those are far away tucked in the background as the others take up a majority of the foreground. When I finished this piece, I didn’t think it would end up being one of my favorites. I was sure that every other student would clog up their illustration with a ton more pedestrians than asked for, so I ended up as one of the few doing it. It turned into more of a Where’s Waldo piece than I had expected, and I love it! I didn’t use to draw so much details in backgrounds and this turned out to be a nice breakthrough piece.
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After the first three projects, we finally got into comics.
Project 4: River Street & the Strange Shop
It was a nice change of pace to get back to comics, but I did enjoy the illustrations, though. This assignment focused on environments, but we critiques still brought up effective storytelling techniques. We were given a premise that a man and woman (older, not college-aged) were walking on riverstreet under an umbrella in the rain. Then one of them drags the other into a shop, and the shop and its “strange” contents were left to the artist. I went with a basic thrift/antique shop that I wish I did more on-site research for. It looks just like a place with junk in it, and not so much an antique store.
The way I made it strange was putting a large creature in it named Rob. It was kind of a hit with my classmates as to where he came from, who he was, and how such a monstrous anything could navigate in a small space with so many breakables.
I liked a lot of the shot calls I made, but panels 1 and 2 were strongly suggested to be switched. Other than those, it read and flowed pretty well.
Project 5: Fort Pulaski
At this point I start feeling fatigued. Drawing is hard work! Especially when drawing environments of real places. We took a field trip to Fort Pulaski, an old Civil War era military shelter. The place was aged with dilapidated bricks and cannons that no longer could fire. I didn’t get a lot of sketchbook work done, but I took plenty of photos and left with a pretty good arsenal. I remember the day being beautiful, and I just reveled in the warmth and amazing scenery.
There were a limited amount of angles one could choose to tell a story of an elderly couple walking out of the fort and crossing the drawbridge. And like Project 4, our story could end with whatever we felt like. I have no explanation for my meditating guru that rises out of the water. I just wanted to draw a guy with a big head.
Project 6: Car
Our next assignment revolved around cars. Prof. G-sleeve is a huge car nerd. He works on them, reads about them, and as a man who hails from the great state of Texas, drives a gigantic one. I’ve forgotten if this assignment was to draw cars from life or imagined. But one thing is for sure, this was my worst piece of the quarter. For some reason I drew in a simplistic style that I usually reserve for character design for animation. Its got a lot more dead line weights than I have been doing this quarter.
To me, it’s just another assignment. It’s the next two that I really got into.
Project 7: The Party
In this project, a man is toasting colleagues in a fancy dining room setting. Then the man hears the telephone ring and exits to answer it. A nerdy character is on the other line and gives him bad news. The man hangs up, pulls out a gun, reenters the dining room, and shoots all the guests. Then the man jumps out of the window and lands in a car with a sexy gal driving, gives her a wink and drives off.
(NOTE: Page 3 is not yet uploaded!)
That’s the sequence of events. We were allowed to change the gender of characters (A woman does all of those things, and jumps into the car with a man driving). So with that, I decided to do some interesting things with my page layouts. At this point during the quarter we had just wrapped up Comics Art Forum and I was on a high from Brandon Graham’s workshop, where the artist spoke on the things in comics that keeps him excited. He showed us comics that had interesting or innovative storytelling devices, panels that were cropped a certain way or gutters that still had images in them. All of these different page layouts added to the story, enhanced storytelling, or were just fun to look at and/or draw.
Page 1 and page 2 are symmetrically laid out, with the last panel of page 1 matching the size and shape of panel 6 of page 2 (something I stole from Alan Moore’s Watchmen). The dining room scene is matched entirely, and the camera angle is the same. The others correspond just by shape and size. I also did a pan on page 2 which worked out well with the sequence of events given. She’s on the phone, hangs it up, then reaches for a gun, all while the camera moves down her body.
Page 3 was fun to do because I adopt a technique from the Kuberts in the first issues of Ultimate Fantastic Four. Black bars similar to a widescreen film are placed on the sides to create a “cinematic” look. I created same-sized panels leading the eye down mimicking the falling of main character as she leaps down herself. In an assignment where every other student’s project could potentially look the same, I tried my best not to wind up doing the same old same old the professor has seen before.
Project 8: Bowling & World War II
Right off the bat, this was my favorite project of the class. The results stunned even me, but its because I put the most work into these four pages than any one page of this class. It was tons of reference-shooting, plenty of research building. It is the perfect culmination of everything we learned in class, realized in a final project.
We were required to follow a script where two old men are at a bowling alley, having a drink at the bar. One is checking out a group of girls/ladies bowling while the other begins to recall a story. The story flashes back to German ME-16 planes attacking B-26 airplanes. A man in the American B-26s is firing on the enemy and look down to the cockpit. Again, we were free to fill in the blank of the story here, as long as we ended the story back at the bowling alley bar where the man is giving a confused look to the storyteller.
We took a field trip to the Mighty 8th Air Force base and there were tons of airplanes to take in. We took advantage of models, costume and gear, and got a feel for what it would be like to be flying a plane and gunning Nazis in a air simulator! I really wanted to tell a more heartening story than a “gag” comic where a funny thing happens during this supposedly serious story. I was interested in drawing a pin-up girl that saved a falling airman, and the challenge I found myself in was how I would design the pages in a way that would allow a reader to believe that this painted design could come to life. It lead to a beautiful payoff where she catches him, a finally, my favorite panel, where she pulls him in and embraces him. It was fun to do!
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This is a required class for a degree in Sequential Art. I’ve learned a lot about creating believable environments and making the world a character itself. I just hope I don’t fall off the wagon and completely leave characters in The Matrix.
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