The Observer Graphic short story prize for 2021 has been awarded to Astrid Goldsmith. Her story is a little rant about the challenges of her grandmothers funeral. Who is her expected audience? It has to be wider than Jewish families with bad experiences of death. Curious people? People who want to see the world from another persons perspective? The review said that it was funny and resonant with others who had organised funerals. I’ve been lucky to avoid the funeral organising so maybe that’s why I found it amusing more than funny but I found it intriguing although, as with all the prizewinning stories, I worried that I had missed the point
I’ve followed this prize for a few years and I’ve realised that the format of the stories are very different to what I was taught to expect. The reader has to do a lot of the work to complete them as they often leave the me hanging at the end. Maybe my story isn’t as lame as I’d thought.
Drawing styles are looser than I’m happy with in my own work. My influences are more graphic novel than short story, I want my pictures to look nice, even pretty, which isn’t very punk rock, but I want to interest my audience visually. I think that there is enough ugliness in the world and I’m reluctant to draw more attention to it.
Paper - Mapping a Life - Reading and looking at contemporary graphic novels Carolyn Kyler
Resonance and tension between words and images
Mapping lives
Oldest forms of storytelling; pictures and personal narrative
Comparing the structure with maps. What is left in or left out. Using maps to navigate the story
This is a rather flippant post about why readers will persist with a story. I think that it all boils down to making them curious enough to want to see what happens next.
Reportage Illustration Gary Embury and Mario Minichiello
The title is slightly oblique to my project but the book is very much about narrative. My take home messages are:
1) that I need to loosen up a lot more, a lot of the illustrations are very gestural and have signs of marks made and discarded but not erased. This palimpsest is an important part of the narrative. I think that I need to use this sparingly in my main project but I like the multiple versions of the dog walker to convey the repetitive nature of the walks. Gestural unfinished marks have more energy and I need to keep this in mind when I want action in my illustrations
2) Single image narratives still tell stories
This picture from the book by Mario Minichiello tells a story about Bondi Beach and is reinforced by the title “Things that you can’t do on Bondi Beach”
Additionally it broadened my concept of reportage drawing. I have spent a lot of time with and gained a lot from the Urbansketchers organisation but their fundamental definition of an urban sketch is that it must be done on site and “live”. Embury and Minichiello show artists who use sketches made in the moment to develop more considered works which are still defined as reportage illustrations.
There’s a lot in this book and I am continuing to return to it for inspiration and information.
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud
I read a borrowed library copy of this book for Illustration 2 and there was so much useful information in it that I’ve invested in my own copy for this module. Comics appear to be a simple format until you look at them properly. I don’t believe that I have enough of a background in them as a reader to be anywhere near good enough to use this format for my project but I can use a lot of the ideas that comics employ. The layout of frames is an absolute black art but using multiple pictures to zone into an area of interest or using frames (and not being constrained by them) is an important tool. This is a book that I reference so often from my first reading of it that I forget what information I use from it.
Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative by Will Eisner. (There are lots of interesting links in this link which I need to explore when I have time)
I’ve only just got this book and I’m working my way through it. There is some interesting stuff about symbolism when applied to characters. I understand how this shorthand is useful when telling a story but I don’t like the way that is oversimplifies characters. People are so much more complex and by oversimplifying them you can loose so much of the richness of a story. My challenge is to narrate without limiting by labelling although I do understand that stories need a degree of simplification to make them make sense. So far this book is provoking me which is a very good thing.
Type Tells Tales by Steven Heller and Gail Anderson
I’ve just ordered a copy of this (I knew that I need it but it got lost in life and Christmas) I know that I need to work on my typography choices, I haven’t even started to think about suitable typography for my project because I know that I need to do a lot more research.
Comments
Post a Comment