News
September 11th, 2009
Listening to a new podcast called Surviving Creativity got me thinking about how I use inspiration when making Sweet and Sour Grapes. When I wrote the story, I drew on elements from Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar series, Wendy and Richard Pini's Elfquest, Noriko Ogiwara's Dragon Sword and Wind Child, and Indigo Girls songs. But with the script finished, inspiration has become less important in what I create.
Work on a typical SSG page is like a puzzle. I break the script into panels and figure out what is important to show in each, optimizing character poses and word balloons for clarity. Many days I feel like I'm not being creative at all since so much has already been decided. I'm glad to rely on my framework on bad days but sometimes I worry my capacity to be inspired will get rusty.
Fortunately, I get to invite inspiration back into my life whenever I have new characters and settings to design. Chapter 2 is about to start so I'm brainstorming visuals elements right now. It's an excuse for me to study other artists like Takehito Harada, Kawase Hasui, Daniel Dociu, and Ryoma Ito. Not knowing what to draw is stressful but it's also exciting because of the potential to create something fantastic.
Comments
Thanks for an interesting post. I'm very curious about your process both on the storytelling and the visual design sides.
I'm glad this was a worthwhile post. Blogging is pretty new to me so I have trouble judging whether or not my posts are interesting to people. I plan to describe my process more in depth in the future.