Father & Son

A short strip experimenting with the following things:

• speech balloons containing pictures instead of words, just to see if it'd work
• minimal use of colour to highlight the emotional temperature - they get more coloured in as they actually start talking to each other (apart from the ghost of the Grandad), who takes the colour with him when he goes

Colour plays a big role in comics (apart from black & white ones, of course!) - from superhero motifs to general mood-setting, but it can also be used in a more stylised way, to communicate something more specific, which was what I was trying to explore here. 

Ed Hillyer's recent "Room for Love" does this, with the brown and blue palettes coming to signify the two protagonists - initially there's no strong reason why either colour should be associated with a particular character (any more than grey, black and yellow inherently signifies "Batman") but by repeated use of the motifs, he trains the reader to associate the colours with the characters, building up a vocabulary on the fly.

As a side-note, for another very powerful use of stylised colour schemes, see the early Jet Li film "Hero".

Sketch for "Leopard woman"

From the sketchbook

Sketchbook - new pens!!

I've been using Pitt Artist pens for several years now (see most sketchbook entries here), and thought them the best thing around. I've recently discovered the Pentel Pocket Brush, with it's long, flexible and very pressure-sensitive nib,  and have been blown away by the kind of detail it can give. I'm still feeling my way with these, but I like the early results - here's a quick sketch from an old newspaper of a (low caste) Dalit family, with a close-up on the fine lines of the central character's face.

U-turn

Another go at using traffic signs to tell a story.

Happy New Year!

Take a leap into the new year!

Sketch from a photo on the BBC website, of a Maltese ceremony where the contestants run up a greasy pole and try to grab the flag on the end of it.

Genesis

 As a commuter, I spend a lot of time looking at traffic signs. We're surrounded by signs, by these sem-abstract symbols somewhere between written words and pictures. "There must be a story or two to be had from these", I thought.