The Martians are coming!

Yet another unsplash email into my inbox... nothing deep this time, just funning around, and focussing on the dialog. Enjoy! Big thanks to Jonathan Velasquez Ramiro Checchi Sven Schlager davide ragusa (twice) Greg Shield Gabriel Santiago Kim Daniel Volkan Olmez for some really beautiful images to work with, and the cosmic Dr Mike 2000's sprawling saga Universe Gun, who's writing inspired the banter between the Chet & Sue characters in this strip.

Water Ways

Another Unsplash kata, using the images mailed 29 Feb. Trying to combine the words and pictures in less of a traditional comic-book way here.

Lots of pale, watery images this week, with the bright yellow of the tree standing out among them.

The canoe was the obvious narrative starting point here, and I "cheated" and did a bit of gimp-ing to remove the boys one by one. Leaving in the reflections started out as an accident, but it was a good one that serves the story well, I think!

Credits: Caleb George Taylor Leopold Silvestri Matteo Brownie Casey Fyfe (twice!) Caleb Thal Dustin Scarpitti Todd Quackenbush Matthew Clark

Tea Bag Ceremony

Another exercise using the curated selection of images from free stock image service unsplash.com, which they email out every ten days. Howto weave these random (and rather good) images into a narrative, given that our brains are hardwired to look for narrative in any sequence of images.

I felt lucky to get a couple of people in this week's selection, and, even better, more than one image of each of them. Just to be clear, the insults on p.4 are an ironical reflection on the calm voice of the narrator, nothing to do with the models!!

There's a seductive sense of authority to the "documentary" narrative voice, even when it's talking gibberish. One mis-step can make the presence of the voice jump back into the foreground.

Image Credits: Paula Vermeulen Noe Araujo Jan Erik Caroline Gutman mr.lee Jake Givens

Nostalgia

A quick kata, following this recipe:

• take a weekly email from the excellent Unsplash.com
• Download all the pictures into Gimp
• Rearrange into a short story (no need to use every image, but extra marks for using most)

I'll be practicing this one regularly here, I think. I enjoyed the repetition of images here, the ambiguity, and the shift in authorial voice between p1 and pp2-4.

Good luck to Maurice and the narrator, whoever they are - here's to a non-violent resolution over a cup of tea!

Credits for Pictures:
Amanda Sandlin, Jacob Walti, Tanvi Malik, Desi Mendoza, Maciej Serafinowic, Gabriel Santiago, Steven Lewis, Mia Di Domenico, Joshua Earle