Thursday, November 6, 2008

Shmeducation-A True Story

Here it is, my graphic short story. The winners of the Observer competition are being published this sunday. Look forward to seeing them.



4 comments:

Matt Buck said...

Lovely piece of visual journalism Alex. Hope it gets some recognition.

alexander matthews said...

Thank you very much, Matt. Much appreciated.

Rod McKie said...

I like this Alex, it's a format you can use to get entire stories down quickly; but I also like your detailed drawings.

There is a compromise, and it's possibly the sort of exercise you use with your students when you get them all to illustrate the same piece of text. You could create a template page with a set number of frames and fill those (I make 9 in pale-blue so I can turn them into anything I like, 1 panel, 2 panels...etc). I find when you are looking at drawing a lot of pages it is strangely comforting to know there is a structure helping you along.

Alan Moore's preference is for 9 columns a page, but I think when you are working smaller, 6 is okay - and I have seen some books, like Kochalka's, that use as few as 4 panels per page.

Good luck in the Observer competition.

alexander matthews said...

Thanks, Rod. Unfortunately I didn't win! I used a template page initially, but I decided to abandon the standard frame format as it was swamping the artwork and I wanted to lighten the tone by giving the drawings space to breathe, Perhaps it wasn't altogether successful. It was largely an experiment for me, but I hope to develop this way of working in the future.