comic book school semester 1: art dump, pt. 1

a load of stuff I made in my first semester at the Center for Cartoon Studies

I was warned that the first semester at the Center for Cartoon Studies would be intense. I was warned! And yet somehow I thought I, “time management is one of my strengths” guy, would have time for personal projects like journal comics and updating this substack. Ha! I have been humbled.

So here’s a dump of some of the odds and ends I’ve made over the past three and a half months.

my self-portrait from Jarad Greene’s lesson on watercolor techniques

had a character design assignment early in the semester, and I convinced myself that the only way to properly get into the mindset for it would be to watch Kung Fu Panda and also fill a sketchbook page with “life drawings” of raccoons (from youtube; I don’t have a death wish).

doodle page! this was an actual assignment??? also an excuse for me to try out these fancy art markers that my friend CJ rescued from the side of the road and gave to me, thank u CJ

went way overboard on an assignment in Dan Nott’s Survey of the Drawn Story class to “make a timeline of comics history” (as synthesized from the introduction to Why Comics by Hillary Chute) like damn, you did not need to go that hard, September Maia. (microns, jet pens, and colored pencils)

Had an assignment to mimic Tove Jansson’s process and style as closely as possible, so these are all drawn with india ink and a metal nib, as Tove would have wanted. (Alas, I couldn’t swing a move to an isolated Scandinavian island and retreat into hermitude, as she did, but we do what we can.) These three strips are autobiographical, except that I am not a Moomin and also usually I wear clothes.

a practice sketchbook page of moomins (pencil)

had a lesson on classic one-panel gag cartoons, here’s one of mine. (india ink)

another one-panel gag. Raise your hand if you also insist on subtitles and then stare at your sketchbook the whole time the show is on, I’m starting a support group (india ink)

from an in-class exercise on spotblacks, also the same week Robyn Smith taught me how to threshold my scanned inks in photoshop! (india ink)

an artist bio I did for our first project in Publication Workshop (india ink and gel pen)

I drafted an entire children’s book while quarantined with covid (round 1), these are a couple of the spot illustrations from the mock pitch package. (india ink and watercolor)

one of my favorite pieces of work I did in Emma Hunsinger’s Drawing For Comics class came out of a lesson on panel-less comics and eye path. (drawn digitally in clip studio paint)

an abstract wordless comic about dysphoria and the relief of getting gender affirming surgery, made after a history lesson from Jason Lutes on emanata in comics. (mixed media: india ink, watercolor, salt, gel pen, glue)

from a color exercise in Shay Mirk’s memoir comics class, which is running again next term on Zoom and there’s a few spots left so you can sign up, I’m TAing! (drawn on printer paper with a dying jet pen and the aforementioned rescued fancy art markers)

the school library had a paper snowflake contest and that apparently was all the motivation I needed to teach myself how to use the radial symmetry tool in photoshop, because I couldn’t just fold paper and cut triangles out of it at random like a reasonable person. I didn’t end up going with this design because it simply would have been too fiddly to cut, so I’m immortalizing the ilovemylibrary.png template here on substack

my actual submission was this cat snowflake, and it won 2nd place, which netted me $5 in printer credit in the school lab. I printed 2,645* pages this term so ANY extra print credit is a boon. *this is the actual number, I looked it up. Apologies to the forest

Part 2 (journal comics from first semester) coming very soon!!