Graphite fiction

Graphic Fiction #1 has grown by another post. Tell your friends!

It looks like new output will hover around one finished drawing per month. Each involves x number of preliminary drawings, most to work out composition and details. Some are largely explorations uncovering ideas for later.

I am trying to take a job-like approach, albeit a part-time, at-home in comfy clothing kind of job. Persistence makes it serious. One hopes. The pace may pick up as in-universe logic overcomes my preconceptions. The past few months have included considerable sketching to figure out how to represent different actions. Most are quite ordinary, such as looking around or pointing. A cool result is that learning to make the old cowboy look like he is doing what he does applies beyond any immediate need. The sketches don’t go out of date. They are also a way of learning the inner lives of characters, and their reality.

As far as media, I’ve committed to pencils on bristol. For the heavy lifting, HB and 4B leads produce a nice range from light gray to near black. I chucked a notion to move eventually to color. That could change, but likely it won’t. Simple process makes it easy to pass a couple hours — most days — enlarging the corpus. A simple product provides an uncluttered stage for baroque conceptualizing.

Putting sequences in “Sequential Art”

I’m sure there exists a venerable body of tags, labels and terminology by which the world of comic strips is sliced and diced. I do not know it, so my language may not square with it. Anyway, this is not exactly a comic strip. Here, “sequence” means all the drawings that make up a discrete adventure. Better yet, a discrete peregrination, possibly including adventure. Think of it as equivalent to a short story. It’s a term for packaging a hybrid beast of visual narrative, free association, occasional bouts of phantasmagoria, and whimsy.

Right now publication is only on my Ko-fi page. In its gallery set-up, Ko-fi provides a comic strip option that is straightforward and painless. It may be possible to do the same on Buy Me a Coffee, but how to go about it is not self-evident. However, if you prefer payment processing on Buy Me a Coffee over Ko-fi, I am just as grateful for support given through that channel.

I have not put the Ko-fi gallery behind a pay wall. It is gratis to view; however, please note that support is deeply appreciated. If you enjoy the work, please, hit that support button and leave a tip, or even consider becoming a subscriber.

The plan for the future is that each sequence will remain open for public view until all its drawings are complete. As I finish a sequence, I’ll change its availability to supporters and subscribers only. The succeeding sequence will be publicly viewable for as long as it is in progress, and so on. If there is interest, I’ll set up a special gallery of reference and background drawings exclusively for supporters and subscribers. “Reference and background drawings” is another way of saying “drafts, variations and roads not taken.” Those exploratory sketches mentioned above.

Puzzler

By the way, the old cowboy does have a name. It has already been indicated. I’ll have to come up with a chivalric order of some kind for anyone who guesses it.