I hate that I can’t show off any of my new projects, so here’s some sketches instead. The first two was from a live modeling session. And lastly is a character sketch from a new serial comic I’m working on. I love you, still!

I’ve got my feet in both comics culture and the culture of stand-up comedy, and I’m seeing two similar conversations happening. Female comedians and female comic readers both face similar issues being that stand-up and comic books are largely male dominated.

First off, I am not a woman. I do not claim to be an expert in feminism or femininity. Just check my dating track record with women.  (Hint: it’s non-existent.) But my audience is surprisingly mostly women. I’ve received more responses, comments, and e-mails from women than men. Most of the people who have approached me after a stand-up show are women. And the people who most get excited about seeing my work at conventions and end up buying my comic books and prints are women.

THE RESOURCES

• Graphic Novelist Hope Larson took a survey to gauge the thoughts of women who read comics.
• There have been a ton of follow-up thoughts sprouting up in response to her results, and some of them can be read here, and one from Kiel Phegley.
• Hope Larson even responds in an interview here with Kelly Thompson.

• Jessie Geller writes how she feels as a female comic.
• Here’s the article by Kate Hendricks linked to at the bottom of previous source, here. Also, here is the Vanity Fair article, “Who says Women Aren’t Funny?” from 2008.
• A new web documentary series called Welcome to the Stage recently just popped up. It’s about stand-up comedy in San Francisco, and though it hasn’t really brought up the issue of “female comedy”, it follows 4 female stand-up comedians exclusively.

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A few small illustrations. Why are they all facing the left??

Did a show in ATL with Josh Wood.

And a comic for The District where I review Prismacolor markers after the jump:

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With another quarter at SCAD completed, I want to post some of the work I’ve done in SEQA 122: Materials & Techniques. One thing I find when taking classes is that I crave to see projects done by past students for particular assignments. You know, just to see how it was done and to avoid some of the problems they ran into.

I’ll only be talking about projects rather than any sketchbook assignments.

Assignment 1: Crowquill (4 illustrations)
There were some simple guidelines for the first project. One still life (the sneaker), one environment (the downshot of the alley), one from a photograph (David Lo Pan). The other instruction was to draw two out of the four illustrations as a line drawing, and draw the remaining two with full value. I’m happy with my sneaker, David Lo Pan, but the environment is not what it could have been. I experimented a lot with it, but to show darkness and shadow the way I did is not the best way to do it.

Assignment 2: Aspect-to-Aspect Environment
I have been enjoying drawing environments a lot. My goals for this piece was that it could actually be a page I could use for a future comic that takes place in the desert. I did lots of research and used flickr for a lot of textures and general inspiration. Its really important to do sketchbook work just working and reworking different ways to actually record some of how environment work in a comic style. And after creating an arsenal of sketches, I just threw them into corresponding panel shapes and formed a composition onto the page. It was a really simple way to work and turned out spectacular. But I’m still not confident with drawings figures within my environments.

Assignment 3: Brush Mutants
Using brush, four illustrations were to be drawn, similar to Assignment 1. We were allowed to divide the page into fours and draw four seperate mutants with brush. Or we had the option to combine all four into a composition on a single page. I chose the latter, thinking that I could use this as a page in a narrative sometime in the future as well. It was a lot of fun coming up with monsters. Pictured is a stone-scaled worm, a tree pirate with a human peg leg, some Wolf-man, and my favorite, the Benjamin Button Baby Bats, all fighting a tough girl. Showing control of brush is very difficult to do. I try to make clean lines rather than do any feathering or dry brush work. I had some trouble creating the composition and some of the monster’s anatomy is unaccurate. It’s not a piece I’m particularly proud of, but I am glad to use brush more because it prepared me for the next assignment.

Assignment 4: Brush Pantomime
Every time I think about this piece when it’s not in front of me, I always think I had done such a lazy job on it. I think to myself that I just sped through this one and didn’t give it the care that it deserves. But whenever I see (like when we were given our pieces back after the grading period), it struck me that it was actually a beautiful page. It is one of my best pages done in brush, and I remember taking my time to handle the brush and create clean linework. It was tough, brush is a difficult medium to handle. But I was able to push through and create something worthy of being part of a bigger story.

Assignment 5: Inkwash Pantomime
Here are the two pages I completed. The first page was entirely environments. I worked differently for this by compiling sketchbook work into photoshop and collaging them into a narrative. I printed them in blue on watercolor paper, and then inked and inkwashed them traditionally. It was a different process that I might employ in the future, doing drawings on seperate sheets and then smashing them together to create one page of comics.

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