Planning to Plan

Working on my comic this week, I was going to write about character development as I am trying to visualize the main character in my story.

She is 60-ish and we have a lot in common so I assumed she would look like me- ego, what ego ? As I am also teaching myself to use Procreate I posed for some selfies and then used the images to draw over. It was a good way to learn how different brushes in the app appear but I also realised it isn’t how I want my character to look, so that was a bit of a dead end as far as the story.

It has made me see that there are still so many stylistic questions I don’t yet know the answers to. That has been the theme of the week as far as this project is concerned. I think I have the story sorted only to discover another layer of complexity I hadn’t considered before. I am not sure if |I am making progress or merely over thinnking.

However, I did find a book,(You Can Do A Graphic Novel, Barbara Slate), and put into practise some of the techniques for planning. There is a chapter on the character ‘Bible’ which has helped to refine who she was. I fixed on her name and surname - although I don’t think her full name will appear in the story. Answering questions such as what her greatest fears would be and what her dreams are helped to make her feel real which makes it easier to decide how and why she reacts to things that happen in the story.

Then, as the book instructs, I assigned each character a coloured post-it note and worked my way page by page through my narrative giving each character their own brief in relation to the action. It seems to have made the story tighter and certainly clarified a few parts. The next part I think is redraw the story in stickmen to see how it flows now that I have reframed some parts. I will report back next week.