Michi Mathias. illustration & comics.
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Six favourite tools of 2017

29/11/2017

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There are other things -- including dip pens, special erasers, and google maps -- that have been very useful this year, but below are six indispensible items which have been invaluable to my work. 

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I know how ridiculous this sounds, but when I lost my favourite pencil in the middle of a big project, I really felt like I couldn't draw. It's the only pencil I've used for at least a couple of years and I couldn't just go buy another as it came from Muji in London, sixty miles away. 

So what's the big deal about it? Well, propelling pencils are great for drawing, what with the consistent line width and no sharpening, but this one also has the special quality of feeling like a real wooden pencil, nice and light unlike the clunky plastic types. I've gotten entirely used to it, and love how it feels in my hand every time I pick it up. Fortunately I remembered I'd probably bought an extra one (they're cheap as well) and managed to find it on a shelf, to my great joy (then a few hours later my old one was found on the sofa).

​This is a line spacer for making consistent lettering heights when writing text into speech bubbles. A more complex one called the Ames guide, which seems to be the industry standard for hand letterers, offers far more options, but this is plenty for me (and was more available and affordable). I just put a pencil tip into a hole, pull it sideways along the blue triangle guide to give me a baseline for a line of text, and then skip one hole vertically in the same column to make a 6mm space to write within.  

Undoubtedly there's a lot more I could be doing with it, but this is enough. For now. It's made a big difference to the consistency of the lettering in my comics. I only wish I'd known about it earlier!
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I usually ink with a flexible fountain pen, the red Noodler's Creaper, and finally found a waterproof ink that doesn't a) take so long to dry that you smudge it constantly, or conversely b) start flowing so slowly from the nib that it takes all the spontaneity out of your linework. This is De Atramentis Archive Ink, and I'm very happy with it. 

Also, I succumbed to a second fountain pen with a very fine nib, the TWSBI Eco (for 'economy' - about  twentynine quid). 
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Plain old post-it notes have been absolutely ideal for working out page layouts for comics, moving panels, changing panels, adding panels. This is like an analogue form of what digital artists do easily, but before I thought of it I was having to start whole pages over every time I wanted to change something even in an early draft. And that was making me hesitant to even start things. Of course, panels are not all this exact size and shape, so it's a simple matter of taping together or trimming post-its. 
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I saw this watercolour set with 24 colours on sale and had to have it as my existing one had only twelve. I once did a watercolour course in which we made all our colours from the three primaries in tubes, and I admire those with that skill and patience and interest but it's not for me. I'm not a proper watercolourist and just don't enjoy mixing up my own colours; plus, if I'm trying to match colours across a multi-page comic, there's the added difficulty of re-doing the same blend, or having made up a massive quantity. 

And now I've found a new set with 45 colours! And a lot more space for thinning with water. That might feature in next year's list... 



​My lightbox (or light table? though it's neither a box or a table) continues to be a great time-saver, and allower of experimental layouts which can then be changed without losing everything and starting over. I can place a new sheet of paper over a draft I've sketched and draw it a little better -- hoping to avoid, however, perfecting all the life out of the original, which is liable to happen. Sometimes I'll scan my draft of some element of a scene, print it bigger or smaller as needed, and use the lightbox to easily put it into the frame at a different size. 
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​So, those are mine at the moment. What are your favourite tools?
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Learning through cutting out snowmen and playing with paper

27/10/2017

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One week ago, at the House of Illustration in London, I was attending a masterclass in character and composition with the very fabulous Alexis Deacon. To my surprise, it was all done using collage: cutting out shapes, arranging and re-arranging them. Playing with paper was my most fun thing as a little kid, yet I've never tried collage before, and here we found that simply pushing the pieces of a snowman shape a little off balance can suggest a surprising degree of emotion and intent. 
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I think my comic characters tend to stand around in fairly static positions too much of the time so it was a revelation to try out these effects from small changes. Using collage saved drawing and re-drawing and erasing, and also allowed for looser experimenting, letting accidental effects happen. 
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Things of course got a little more complicated as we then had to use random cut-out shapes to form new, imagined characters (which I never do, by any sort of method, and found terribly difficult). When I got stuck and admitted I was clueless, Alexis sat down and showed by example; he was kind and helpful and constantly moving round the room to check on everyone's progress with real enthusiasm.   

Finally we had to place these characters against a background scene in a way to express something about the newly created character. Alexis showed us some elements of background composition which included:

- leaving empty space for certain effects
- directing characters' gaze toward other characters or something of note, guiding the viewer's eye
- separation or overlapping unification of silhouettes indicating relationships between characters 
- visual links by echoing colour or shape, grouping elements through use of shared colour pallette
- reader's viewpoint - from character's eyes, or cinematic overhead distance shot near ending... 

These notes are pretty sketchy and some of the concepts probably too subtle for what I do but it was fascinating to learn about how much is going on, probably at a subconscious level, when looking at a beautifully made graphic novel. Alexis was very clear in his explanations, truly an excellent teacher. 

And I think I might even try a bit of collage in planning some panels for my graphic novel Two Shillings per Day. Anything that can help add variety to the look of four people cycling along country roads has got to be good!

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How to make myself do an ink drawing every day

3/10/2017

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It's #inktober again. Every October, artists and illustrators take part in this challenge to make a drawing in ink every day of the month and post online. It was started by Jake Parker as a way for him to get better at inking, so in that spirit I've chosen something I'm not good at, in the hope that a burst of concentrated daily practice will help me improve. 

That thing is drawing people. Faces, expressions, funny positions from different perspectives. I'm much more confortable with inanimate objects, but recent illustration commissions have featured humans and it can't be avoided, really! I'm also going to have some people be on old bicycles, as this will be helpful preparation for my Two Shillings per Day graphic novel. 

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So here's Day One.

It's done, as usual, in fountain pen.

And very unusually, a huge blob of ink dropped onto the man's face, totally obliterating it.

So I used white-out to cover, and re-drew.

I didn't notice until after I'd posted it that the eyes went all weird in the process, and I want to correct it now, but this is how it appeared on instagram &c so this is how it is.

If you want to see whether or not I manage the whole 31 days, have a look here on instagram. Search #inktober2017 to see everyone else's fantastic work. 


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Only 138 pages to pencil, ink and colour

2/6/2017

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This is my entire graphic novel, Two Shillings per Day, all 138 pages of it in rough draft form. Very very rough. Post-it notes in a binder, some not even with pictures, still moveable around if it's too text-heavy in places (very likely) or I just want to change the layout of a page or two (I hope not TOO much of this). 

I photographed the whole thing because I had a lot of trips away in May and wanted to take the work in progress with me, even camping where I was playing music at a festival, and the thought of losing it.....  well, doesn't even bear thinking about. I doubt if I would have the heart to start over again...but I would have to, eventually.... This made it risk-free and I got some good hours on trains to work on it. 

Weirdly, seeing it all laid out like this makes it somehow seem more possible! I even had to count the pages to see if they were really all there. It's a lot, especially as I've never made anything this large before, but I actually think it's going to be doable. 

​Watch this space. 
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Why broadcasting matters: Draw the Line comics

20/1/2017

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My comic artist friend Myfanwy Nixon had an idea for a comic book full of actions, big or small, that people could take in these difficult political times, instead of just hopeless despair. 

Over a hundred action ideas were collected, and over a hundred artists from near and far came forward to illustrate. I was delighted to be given the topic Broadcast, drawing something to accompany text about radio and podcasts being a great way to get a message across, as exemplified by Refugee Radio which operates over the community station RadioReverb in Brighton.  
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First I went to meet with a couple of people at Refugee Radio to find out how they work. Maybe I could show a true life story of difficulties faced, and how people are being helped.  But as I thought about it, I wanted to aim for persuading the average person to get involved and with each draft I simplified the scenario to make this message clear. As it happens, I have a little experience with community radio myself (though my programmes only featured enjoyable chats with musicians) and the inset portrays my own initial reaction to being asked! I wanted to show it's not really too hard. 
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Having worked out a rough layout, this still kept changing as I tried to draft a final version to ink: it didn't work to show all the tech gear that's really there, and I even hid the presenter's mic as it just looked too messy with two. I hope the background figures convey the idea of a listening audience. This wasn't made any easier by thinking about the importance of doing it really well, especially considering it would sit alongside contributions from some truly great artists...

I won't go into the difficulties of scanning watercolour without it ending up either too light or too dark, with colours nothing like the original. Suffice it to say final tweaks took an absurd number of extra hours. But I made the deadline today, and am looking forward to seeing it with everyone else's beautiful work up on the website soon and printed in a book after that. 

Update 21 February: the website is now live at 
http://drawthelinecomics.com/ Check it out! 
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Announcing: a new project that really might be too big.

3/1/2017

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I'm outing myself here in the hope this will help keep it going: I've started drafting a graphic novel, based on a 220 page book written in 1897, with hardly any conversation to quote and not much in the way of suspenseful story arc either.

T.H. Holding combined two of his great passions -- cycling and camping -- and set out to try a short tour by bicycle in Ireland. He went with three friends, carrying a tent he'd made himself, although only two of the four rode machines we would recognise as bikes today. 

It's full of detailed observations and social history, not to mention the fascinating differences in how camping was done, told in a firmly idiosyncratic author's voice which I am using exclusively for the text. 

This has been in my head for the past two or three years, though I honestly had no idea of how I could possibly do it when I first thought of it, and probably still don't, really. But I'm going for it anyway, because I'm excited by it and want this story to be told.

I'm grateful to the Camping and Caravanning Club's archivist, mentioned in previous post, for helpful additional material. 

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How to beat procrastination

4/10/2016

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Well, this is a funny thing.  After having a couple of projects on the go for sooo long it seemed doubtful I'd ever really do them, they both got done this summer. (Those two being Up, Down, or Stay the Same? and Just a Normal Day?)

On the right is me talking to Jessica Abel over skype, showing her my work schedule which resulted, however loosely, from the planning techniques I learnt from her Creative Focus Workshop earlier in the summer. And with this plan, the projects actually got done.

Having been such a Class A procrastinator previously, the difference was amazing enough that I got interviewed and featured on Jessica's blog as a case study! 

I've got a lot to live up to now! And I'll need all these tools to make headway with my next project, which is much bigger than anything I've done before.  More about that one soon. 

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Sneak peek at Comics Art Trail window for Kendal shop

31/8/2016

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On the left is an early WIP (work in progress, that is) bit of the window display being made for a shop, as part of the annual Lakes International Comic Art Festival in October. 

And on the right are some more bits for the display. It's an art supplies shop that also does framing, and it's a nice idea if the artwork can be related somehow to the business.

Last year was my first go at doing one of these, and I made a rather complicated scene for a shop selling paintings and prints. Using techniques and materials that were entirely new to me. 
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So this time I knew what to expect, and and did things a little differently. Somehow I was  still right up against the deadline, though, and only got the package shipped off via Parcelforce 48 hour service at lunchtime today. It'll be in place at the weekend, at which time all will be revealed! I'll be up there for the festival in a couple weeks, and hope to be happy when I see it in situ for the first time. 
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Just a Normal Day? 

17/8/2016

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Today, this arrived from the printer.  Just a Normal Day? - a choose-your-own-pathway interactive comic about small kids and self-employment.

It's the culmination of many years of thinking and planning and starting and stopping, and finally a few very intense months of drafting, drafting, re-drafting, inking, colouring, and formatting. 

It's a little hard to believe it's really moved from being mostly in my head for over a decade, to being real little books in my house. 

I'm happy to admit this probably wouldn't have happened this year (or even next year or the year after, judging by past experience) without a far more organised approach to getting on with creative work, taught by Jessica Abel earlier this year. 

It's all about focus on one thing, asking yourself the right questions, breaking down projects into definable steps, finding a good way to stop losing ideas, figuring out what's really possible in a given time, planning and reviewing and being accountable, and much more. It worked. If you have things you've been meaning to do forever and keep getting stuck, this could really help! 

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How to create a short book in only fifteen years

20/7/2016

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About fifteen years ago I had an idea.

I'd seen some of those choose-your-own-adventure gamebooks that involve making decisions and turning to different pages accordingly as you navigate your way through a story and try to stay alive.

With two small kids in primary school, and me trying to do freelance work, there were a lot of little things that could go wrong and mess up ones day. So I started thinking of making a little adventure story based on real life just for fun, to share with friends.  

​A few pages in, and it got abandoned. But not forgotten.. 
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Four years ago, I needed to find a project to do for an online course, and I resurrected this idea with one additional element - I would also illustrate each page. Within a month, I'd worked out the twists and turns of a forty-page adventure using post-it notes and arrows on a big board - which was very tricky and so much fun! - and drawn several pages. But again, it got put aside while I did other things.  

Then a couple of years ago I began making comics. And I began to think this would be more interesting if I re-worked the whole thing as a choose-your-own-adventure comic, not something I've ever even heard of. So I redrafted the story to make it conversational and active, rough drafted that in more detail, then drew the final pencil draft. Then I used those pencilled pages as a guide while doing the inking onto good Bristol board paper over a light box, as in photo. 

Today I finished inking the last of the 40 pages, and now need to do the colour. I have a printer lined up and ready to go - just have to send the files within the fortnight in order to have the books available at my ArtWave exhibition in August! Hard to believe the end is in sight after all these years.

Edit 10 Aug: Now completed and sent to printer. There's a short playable version online here.  
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Michi Mathias     illustration & comics    

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