What is this project about?
"The diary of the young comic artist" was a massive project, done for the 10th anniversary of Manga Academy. It combined 19 authors. Some of the participants were already accomplished artists but most were students who studied in the academy in the past years.
This gave room for the young up-and-coming artists to express their opinions on the most important things connected to comics that they have learned - the things that they have struggled with, how they keep themselves motivated in the process of making a project, how they dealt with failure, how they managed time and this was just the tip of the iceberg of the topics that they engaged in.
Every participant was free to write, make an illustration or a comic related to a theme he/she felt attached to, the only condition was that it had to be connected with comics.
First steps...
This was a really big project and it had its obstacles... Like how are all the projects going to be managed at the same time. How is everybody going to keep track of the deadlines and so on...
Luckily for us the art director - Anna Tsocheva - of the project had solutions the problems - the different projects were separated by their medium - comics, illustrations and texts. And each type had its own deadline.
For the comics
we started out with an overall idea for each project separately. We had to give a short synopsis, mood board and designs for the comic...
My inspirations...
Couple of years back I read Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics and Making Comics, I was really moved by him. His understanding and usage of the medium. How he talked about comic books within a comic.
So I wanted to do something in a similar fashion. And one of the themes that I found fascinating ever since I learned about it was - Rhythm in comics. That is how I decided the topic for my piece.
Work in process...
The project had to be done within a year. This meant that we didn't have to complete the comics immediately after doing the preparatory work. We had the luxury to put the project aside for some time. To lay it rest a bit.
After a couple of months I "opened up" the project again. And realized that I didn't have a clear message and a direction in it (even dough I thought I had one in the beginning).
Realizing this I redid the script and the thumbnails for the comic.
Below you can see the different thumbnails for the pages.
The final pages...
Mock-ups by www.customscene.co
I'm already missing the calls that we did with the team especially every time that somebody had forgotten about something and you had to remind them and all the panic that they were in. And all the discussions on how to proceed forward and so on. I can't wait to do another project like this one.
