STORY: Reference Life

At work we have an occasional visit from a cute little doggie called 'Korra', she's like a Corgi / Sausage Dog and really has a great personality. I remember sketching her once when she was running outdoors, and she came to mind as a potential great main character for this story. A naive, sweet, gentle little dog to face a horrible apocalyptic world filled with monster and undead creatures.

Below some of those quicksketches I did of Korra:

These are some sketches I did later from memory inspired by her:

STORY: Character sketches

Once I had my initial idea. It's time to explore more ideas, some people will do that by writing, but as artists I feel we should do this through drawing aswell. So a great way to get a feel for your characters and start thinking about the possibilities of their abilities to deal with the problems in the story is to write down 'ACTIONS', like 'cooking, running, sleeping, relaxing, panicking, etc..

Don't stay on model, because at this stage you shouldn't have anything definite, it's a piece of clay ready to be molded and remolded until you feel it's right.

Unfortunately since I didn't have a working pc for a while, I didn't scan in my drawings, but I found a sheet with some of the sidekick characters. As you can tell these are really bad drawings, but they are scribbles of the mind. They help you think and develop characters, good drawings come later (hopefully :D)

STORY: CONCEPT IDEA

So embarrassing as it may be, I'm going to post my progress here with my story. If I would retrace it afterwards when I'm finished, I probably would've forgotten what I came up with first.

THE IDEA

I think ideas can come from anything, they can be good or bad. But usually any idea that you stumble on will be exciting at least for those first moments. So better have a pen ready to write it down before you forget or talk yourself out of it.

My idea came to me while I was in bed, watching a movie half interested. My mind wandered and I came to the idea of doing a Zombie apocalypse from the perspective of a pet. That's it, simple concept but it ticked all the boxes for me.

(below is that very first page with the birth of the idea)

Immediately what came to mind was 'the Secret Life of Pets' and a manga called 'I am Hero'. And that's all you need to get started on your idea. A strong enough of an idea to spark a lot of visuals, characters and world building. And most importantly something you can see yourself draw/write.

STORY: Recommended Books (so far)

So even though I've mainly used this blog to talk about drawing, my journey has been slowly leading me back to why I even started drawing. And that was to tell my own stories.
Unfortunately my skills as a storyteller are pretty weak, since I never practice those muscles. It's easy to just stick to what you are good not bad at. But if you are a sucker for punishment like me, then you will just keep throwing yourself into things you don't know how to do.

So look forward to see me fail my way through bringing a story to life in 2019. What I wanted to do with this post is to post some books that I have found very useful so far in the early stages of this new Journey. I'll continue educating myself on story, but I feel these have been great in providing a good basis to build from:

1) Structuring your novel 

The first one I'd recommend is ' Structuring your novel' by K.M Weiland, which I bought for £3 on amazon. It gives you a nice overview on story structure, which can be used a framework to poor your ideas into.

2) PIXAR Storytelling

The second one is PIXAR Storytelling, which I briefly had as part of Amazon's Kindle Unlimited. I have put it on my to buy list since. It breaks down certain storytelling rules that PIXAR uses, with examples of the movies.

3) Outlining your novel

Next up I would recommend getting 'outlining your novel' by K.M Weiland. She recommends to start with this one if you plan to go through 'Structuring your Novel' afterwards. But if like me, you are writing your first story, I would just get the basics and start writing before the whole thing becomes so overwhelming that you'll just abandon your project. I will say however that there are great tips here for brainstorming ideas and adding some extra meat and substance to your story.

4) The War of Art

This last one is not actually going to help you understand story any better, but it WILL help you keep your head above water and keep up the momentum to fight on and finish your project! This book aims to break down procrastination and doubt! It's an easy ready, and I'm sure you'll want to hang up some quotes to keep you inspired :)

Christmas Doodle

I haven't drawn in this style for a while, here's a christmas sketch. The cat is out little guest this Christmas, her name is Joda! :D

STAR WARS : Rey Poses

Been a while since I practiced posing. Just watched The Force Awakens again, I really like that movie.

STUDY: Blade of the Immortal Sketchbook

STORY STRUCTURE: Let's start!

So since I moved into storyboarding I really want to focus my efforts now into creating my own stories, but I am not really good with story so decided to get some books to help me and I found this really good one that I started reading: structuring your novel by K.M Weiland. I bought it on kindle for £3, really can't go wrong :P

We start off with Chapter 1: The Hook. This is for novels, but can also be applied to movies and comics. Basically you need to get the audience audience as quickly as you can, and you do that by making the audience ask questions. Along with that you should try and cover the character, setting and tone aswell. Quite a lot to cover in a small amount of time :P

Anybody interested should check out the book, I just wanted to analyse a couple of opening pages from some manga I have lying around to see how well their hook is.

First one I looked at is Stone Ocean (JoJo's bizarre adventure):

So right here on the opening page we've got some dead folk lying about, looks like the car ran them over and is pulling a runner. And a pretty awesomely designed woman at the scene of the crime.

So immediately we have questions: Why are these guys dead, who's in the car? Why is she standing there? And where can I get that awesome tattoo done? -> Hooked

Other elements also ticked off. We have the main character, the setting looks like modern day, as for mood, going by her Chun Li Punk look, I think we're in for some fighting later on.

Next one is Blade of the Immortal by Hiroaki Samura:

I'm going to say it's not the best example, but it still does a good job posing some questions:

- Why is a samurai in church to confess? What did he do to kill one hundred people, is he a bad guy? What is the priest going to do?
I also introduces us to the main character, the setting clearly is historical, and we can expect quite some violence if the main guy already hacked up 100 guys before the story even started :D

Last example is the movie 13 Assassins by Takeshi Miike (above)

The movie basically opens up with a suicide (hara kiri), which is always an interesting one. Who is this character? Why did he commit suicide? This is all explained in the next scene btw :P But it's also just beautifully composed with the white clothing and blade. It lets the viewer know that we're going to see a movie that puts some care in its' visual style, and prepares you for the type of physical and mental torture you're about to see.

STUDY : Hiroaki Samura

Hiroaki Samura is the artist that draws Blade of the Immortal. I was using the pentool to do some sketches from the manga.

ROUGH BOARD: PETSQUAD Pt2

PART 2 of this Un-edited straight ahead pass. I went off script here because the rat wasn't even in the story I wrote by this point.