THE ART OF COMICS
Shannon Watters offers advice on getting busy with comic creation
“Comics is a small place, and it is an artform that continues to expand and grow. It makes sense that the progressive storytelling wing of comics has surged so intensely in the last ten years, because it is such an intimate medium and it allows such a person-toperson form of expression. The gatekeepers are thinner on the ground for comics. I always recommend that young people read Understanding Comics by Scott Mccloud. It’s a really important place to start to understand the terms for the things that you feel when you’re reading a comic. The best way to learn comics is to make comics.”
own little personality.” Hollow’s illustrator Berenice interjects and wryly observes: “Guess who spent their whole childhood drawing horses? The horse is one of my favourite characters in the book. It really is its own character.” Berenice’s observation prompts her to give an overview of the visual aesthetic for Hollow, and begins by noting: “We all come from such different backgrounds when it comes to graphic novels and sequential storytelling. So, it’s super interesting. Branden and Shannon each have their own story to tell.”
BRINGING THE STORY TO LIFE
As Berenice describes her process, it becomes clear just how vivid the dynamic between word and image is. She explains, “I’ve actually been thinking a lot about the medium of graphic novels lately: especially what kind of place Hollow takes for me personally and from what I’ve seen in the [comics] market. Hollow bridges very nicely between kid’s comics, children’s books and adult books. It’s a recent trend here in Germany to adapt classical literature into graphic novel format. I really like that Hollow has a light-heartedness and a magical element to it and this is something that you can portray very well with
I like the characters to be very open and very welcoming in their expressiveness
comics. You can intertwine a magical element into your storytelling and it just works on paper in a way that maybe would be different in film. Also, there’s a certain magic to having the words in the script and then seeing it come to life as a picture.”
Berenice goes on to address one of her favourite aspects of working on Hollow: drawing the comic’s cast of characters and their unique personalities. “I really loved illustrating all of our own main characters. I think they are all very unique in their own backgrounds and in their dynamics with each other. It’s something I always look for in a character, and when I have a script in front of me and it describes the feelings of the characters, I always try to make their expressions as clear as possible to read. I like the characters to be very open and very welcoming in their expressiveness.”
She continues: “For Hollow, to illustrate each character and their emotions, they all have different body shapes. They’re all different types of people, and so that was always something I was looking for: to be able to portray as many types of people as I can. The characters feel very
unique to me. Plus, the landscape in which all of this is happening is very unique in its own way, so that was a lot of fun to illustrate. I love drawing landscapes.”
VISUALISING THE SCRIPT
For Berenice, Hollow marks a major moment in her own emerging career, and she begins to unpack her process: “I stuck to a very traditional approach. I made the thumbnails first and then went on to the pencils. I did the pencils traditionally on A3 paper and then cut the pages and scanned them all in. Then, if I got the OK to go forward with the line art, I did that digitally and put it in the right format. I really love the mixed process between traditional art and digital art. I mostly work digitally these days, but I wouldn’t want to miss working traditionally. So, I chose a process that would include both.”
Of the fusion of digital and ‘traditional’ approaches, Berenice explains that her first step was to “read the script very carefully, of course, and then think about how a particular sequence might flow nicely when translated to a comic page. Then, I laid out the panels of this page in a small thumbnail drawing. This stage is really just to get the first ideas out. The next step was the pencils stage, where I drew the panels on the page. For this, I used a light blue Pilot Color Eno mechanical pencil. I prefer these because their lead is very soft, yet they are not as dark as regular pencils. This allows me to work from a light sketch to a final drawing. For Hollow, I had already prepared a bunch of A4 papers with the format of the comic book printed on them, so I was able to work in the correct dimensions right from the start. Then I scanned the page and continued to work digitally from that
Comics are a really beautiful, interesting medium, they offer such an intimacy of sequential storytelling
point on. For that I used a Wacom Mobile Studio Pro 13 and Photoshop. This was also the point where I usually sent in a batch of my latest pencilled pages to my editors for a first round of feedback. I did the corrections digitally, since that was easier than going back into the drawn page again. Once we agreed on all the changes that needed to be made to the pencils, I was given the OK to go ahead with the line art. This was followed by one or more rounds of feedback until we had the feeling that the page worked out this way.”
A DEVELOPING STYLE
Berenice then elaborates on the deeper ride that she has taken into haunted, storytelling country: “My journey to finding a style has been quite clear from the beginning. I wanted to do a semi-realistic style to have the opportunity to be as expressive as I want. I wanted a style that would allow me to draw pretty much everything, either in a more realistic way or in a more stylised way. So, this kind of flexibility was something I was looking for. To this day, I’m still not done finding a style. I’m still a university student studying illustration. I’m still very much experimenting and I would say that my style is like a work in progress, always at any time.” With just a short time until the book is published, Berenice makes clear her hope for the project: “I hope teenagers and tweens pick it up and see themselves in the characters and get a lot of joy from reading it. My dream would be that it becomes someone’s favourite book, someone’s favourite thing.”