Every month I drop a new 5-Day project, to help you add some variety to your daily creative practice, or to serve as a ramp to gently invite you back in if you’ve fallen off. Whether you make art for the pure joy of it or if you’re a working creative professional, I encourage you to try a Ten Minute Artist practice.
The practice of creating something for yourself daily, even if only for ten minutes.
In this project we’re going to talk about MAKING COMICS
One last thing before we begin: I’m starting another cohort for Gameplan: How to be an Artist on July 6th and you can get a preview by turning that on here.
Welcome to Day 2 of : Making Comics
My goal in this series is to give you everyday a new way to fill a spread with combinations of comics and words.
To collect memories and ideas that can become seeds for future things, but also joyful and informative in themselves. To be completely honest I’m selfishly building my own set of ‘Templates’ if you would like to give me a 4 panel comic everyday. For now this is a kind of private practice, but my hope is one day I will be making comics for public consumption.
The template I gave you yesterday is one I have used for years, and it’s an easy default. But now I want to stretch myself.
The first panel from day 1 answers the question: “What I did you do yesterday”. Today’s comic will focus entirely on that. The reason the question is what you did yesterday, and not today, or a week ago… is because there is a right balance of detail from memory, but also some of the less important details have already been forgotten.
It’s like trying to remember a dream.
Are we remembering, or maybe imagining…
There is something precious about the memory of yesterday, in that, like a dream this level of detail soon expires, and so capturing it allows it to live on in your artist diary.
I learned this exercise from Lynda Barry’s book ‘Making Comics’. She calls it ‘Four Box Diary’.