This week at TPub - my learning continues!

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Long days at Tpub leave me like this. Don't tell Neil though.

Here are the things I have learnt this week:

I struggle with writing; I was diagnosed with dyslexia at a young age but luckily it’s not that severe compared to others. My reading is fine but my writing still suffers and has only gone downhill since I left school and stopped writing regularly. When tasked by Neil to write something (like a blog post for example) I would often find myself at a loss of where to start, or I’d start writing and never end, drowning out the point I was trying to make. Neil helped me out by reiterating something I had learned in school, when writing set out with a specific goal or point you want to make and keep it in mind. This way I won’t get lost halfway through a paragraph losing my original point. 

Last week I wasn’t in the office that long, between going home early, a sick day and a day off it felt like I was barely there. Even though I had Friday off I still had some things I needed and wanted to do. Despite this I still found myself rolling out of bed at 2pm. I was having thoughts to myself the night before “oh I’ll wake up early anyway” which obviously didn’t come true. I wasn’t being realistic with myself. This left me a short amount of time to get work done before I had to go out in the evening. What this taught me is to plan things appropriately, even if they’re small and seemingly easy. If I had planned to go to bed earlier I would have saved myself a bunch of stress the next day, but I didn’t give any thought to it and caused more stress as a result. 

That wasn’t a lesson learned directly about comics but more about work in general which will apply to everybody.

Emailing people about work was a foreign concept to me before I had started my internship. Emails were only sent to me after I had signed up to something. Because of this I made a couple newbie mistakes when communicating with people over email that I’ve rectified since then

Artistically

Getting constant feedback on my artwork has let me know what areas I should focus on to improve like expressions and finished linework. This has made my art improve in quality in a relatively short time. I went into more depth on this topic on my other blog post http://readingcomicsmakingcomics.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/solas-view-on-art.html

Artist Paulo Rivera uses himself as reference often and then posts the pictures for other artists to use.

Working from reference has helped me spot what areas I struggle drawing so I know what to focus on when practicing. For this reason it's good to do studies and references from multiple different sources so you can identify where you're struggling. You could realize you're not very good at drawing people with long hair, or that clothing looks stiff and unnatural when you draw it. This also builds up a bigger mental bank of things you can draw. You'll find it easier drawing people of multiple body types, hair styles, facial features and postures. One of the worst offences a comic artist can commit is sameface, where all their characters look indistinguishable except for clothing/hair.

TPub isn't all serious though, heres me at Brighton Comic Con helping out the table