Exercise - Girl meets boy

I played with several different ideas, I wasn't very excited by the idea of a simple love story or the idea that the boy or girl did something bad/wrong which caused them to split up.

What if they didn't intend to split up but were forced apart? What could have forced them to part? War or disaster? Refugees aren't especially prominent in the news at the moment but I'm sure the problem hasn't gone away. Dan Peterson did some brilliant reportage illustrations of refugees being rescued from the sea. What if the boy and girl were separated when their boat sank?

I lack recent experience with comics, apart from the earlier research I haven't read them since I was a child. I felt I needed some help here so, on the advice of Shaun Tan on his website I borrowed the marvellous Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. This is a brilliant, very readable book that sheds insight not only into comics but how we see and communicate through drawings. I had been heading for a semi realistic style similar to the drawings in The Arrival but I decided that I wanted my characters to be more universal so that everyone could relate to them.
Using some large sheets of paper and charcoal that could be easily erased I mapped out my story.

At first I started drawing onto a single large sheet of paper for the cartoon but I wanted more space to create detail. Also, to add atmosphere, I wanted the boy to board the boat at night. I covered a sheet of paper with charcoal and lifted the shapes of the passengers with a rubber.

It didn't work very well, I always find it hard to remove enough charcoal with my rubber, so I added some more highlights with white chalk.

Scanned in and reduced in size it's not too bad. In the light of this discovery I decided to draw the frames individually, scan them in and assemble them as a story on a single sheet.
I tackled the sinking ship next.

 Although the charcoal looked like swirling waves on the paper it lost some of that when I scanned it

So I added some torn paper.

 I wanted the girl to stand out from the other figures so I gave her the only colour in the cartoon on her scarf.

After I scanned them I added the dialogue boxes, (is this the only time that you're allowed to use Comic Sans?!) It's harder than you think to choose appropriate dialogue, I didn't want to state the obvious, the drawings were there to tell the story I didn't need to repeat myself but I wanted my characters to have voices of their own.
Although I had planned out the frames it was a bit of a fiddle to fit them all in and I ended up with a space.

I decided to add a wordless frame of the boy feeling overwhelmed by the shipwreck and subsequent loss of the girl.

I think that this is the best version.

The final version looks like this.

As you can see I added some shading to the frame above. Is it clear to the reader that this is the rescue ship? I had to shrink the original to persuade the blog to upload it so the frame when the boy and girl meet is a bit difficult to read. This is a larger version.

She doesn't look particularly beautiful now either, also I've got the speech bubbles and the thought bubbles the wrong way round so you read their thoughts before you read what they say. I guess it still makes sense this way round.

The story lacks detail but I'm limited by the single page format. In hindsight I should have spent more time developing their relationship and reduced the size of the frame where they board the ship. Charcoal worked better for the final design than I had expected but does make the pictures look a bit grubby in places and the girls scarf isn't as bright as it should be. In fact this is the weakest image so I redid it.

This version is sharper and clearer. In this situation charcoal needs to be clear and simple or dark and moody. Here is the new frame in the story:

It's still a fairly clumsy attempt to tell the story and increases my respect for graphic novelists.

Tutor feedback

She agrees that this is a bit clumsy at times although she liked the layout and the way that I tried to strip back the story to keep things clear and simple. As I suspected, the digital text didn't work with the seriousness of the story, but also there is a jarring between my style of drawing and the inevitably  controlled lines of computer generated typography. I learnt from this for Assignment 3.