Every character who walked into the Farm Shop Cafe made me think that I’d like to try animating them. I’m currently reading Walt Stanchfield’s Drawn to Life, based on a long-running series of drawing classes that he arranged for Disney animators, inbetweeners and clean-up artists. My aim here was to try to catch gestures, which Stanchfield describes as mini-stories. His method is rather like the way that I attempt to draw people walking by: getting an instant impression of the whole pose and character. I think of it as taking a mental photograph, a test of memory, but Stanchfield wants us to develop the storytelling elements suggested in the pose, costume and character in that instant.
Having tried animating in Clip Studio Paint EX on my iPad Pro, I now feel much more at home using it for the much simpler process of designing a comic strip. Putting my random sketches into the frames of a Clip Studio comic strip immediately gets me thinking what could the story be here, even though I know these four people had no connection with each other. I added each pose to the frames at random, just to fill the grid that I was drawing as I went along.
The only conscious connection that I imposed was adding the bearded man to fill the left-hand side of the letterbox frame. That implied a conversation with the coffee-drinking man already occupying the right-hand side of the frame. I turned the eyes of the characters towards each other but resisted the urge to add word balloons, I’ll experiment with that in another sketchbook comic strip.
Note that, on Stanchfield’s advice, I’ve at last gone back to my sketchbook. This one is A5 portrait format; my pocket sized A6 sketchbook isn’t big enough for quick random sketches. I’d soon find myself running off the edge of the page.