When I started this blog, I said that one of its primary purposes would be to serve as a place where I could discuss why I draw and what it means to me. I realize now that I have been putting this off long enough.
I draw because I love stories, and after I discovered that I love stories told in a graphic medium, I realized that I wanted to create them. I went through one of those near-inevitable downturns in my fiction reading somewhere in elementary school, when I decided that I was "too old" and "too imaginative" (silly, no?) to need or want things like pictures gracing words. (Irony of ironies: one of the things that spurred me to this very adult decision was Gaston's horrified reaction to Belle's picture-free book in Disney's Beauty and the Beast.) So it took me until someone loaned me their prized Sandman trades to realize that I do, in fact, love comics.
I draw because it's new to me. I am new to it. Everyone should have the joy of being able to do at least one thing they are new to and one thing they are accomplished at. I like learning to draw and I've been writing for pretty much all of my conscious memory . . . so, writing and drawing a comic feels wonderful. Frustrating and terrifying and wonderful.
I draw to learn. I have learned so much about comics as a form of expression from the simple act of trying to create my own. Writing a comic is everything and yet nothing like writing a poem or story. And pacing a comic--specifically, a webcomic, which updates one page at a time--is like nothing I have ever tried to do before. My hat is seriously, seriously off to webcomickers who manage to pace their comics well. For me, pacing is the Philosopher's Stone of webcomics.
I draw a webcomic because I like to read webcomics. I check for updates of my favorite webcomics as part of my daily morning routine. I read them archivally when I'm sick or sad. Furthermore, the webcomic is a fascinating and relatively new animal on the creative scene, and I think there's a part of me that just wants to be a part of that, in howsoever limited a way.
I draw for practice and I draw for catharsis. I look at pages from a year ago and I can think "Hey, look-improvement!"--and that's an amazing feeling. I also draw--and write--to work through and learn to accept my ever-changing thoughts and emotions.
I draw for therapy. I like activities that calm me down and draw me out of the world without the use of drugs and alcohol. A good drawing session is like a good cup of tea and soft music, or having a cat on my lap on a rainy day. It just . . . helps.
On a not-entirely-unrelated note, page #89 is up at Familiar Magic. Only 11 pages left until I hit 100 . . . which makes me a little bit happy.
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2 comments:
Mmm. I think I like stories and drawing and writing but I have been made painfully aware that I am not good enough at any of them to do them for the audience of teh intarwebz. Teh intarwebz is very picky.
For a while I was doing writing in my free time in class (like when the teacher is going over a problem I already understand) because if I write in English I have privacy. What I can draw in class is limited to what I won't mind people seeing over my shoulder, which is pretty much limited to benign furries nowadays. It's hard to make time outside of class because that's my reading time and I have a lot I want to read. But it sucks, I haven't been drawing enough to have improved over last year, not by a long shot. Long-running internet comics give me hope that if I drew a page every week I would eventually get better too, but this doesn't seem likely to happen.
I'm thinking of starting some project under a pseudonym no one knows about so I can be crappy without embarrassing my usual identity.
Nothing wrong with that. There's a reason that my "identity" here is not the same one that I use for, say, school--even if I did announce the comic elsewhere. (It took me months to get up the courage, though.)
Webcomic audience responses are inconsistent, to say the least. Based on the comics that I read / have read over at SmackJeeves and DrunkDuck (and the reader comments below them), their audiences seem pretty friendly. They seem to have built-in page-rating systems, but the people who bother to comment there tend to be the ones inclined to give good scores.
Drawing in public is hard! I've been trying to train myself to get over my anxiety while doing it, but it's slow going. I've found that finishing a drawing is easier in public than starting one, for some reason. I think it's because I'm a little less nervous when I have some idea of what I'm going to do next. There's nothing quite like making a few tentative pencil-scratches on a page and looking up to see that someone is watching--at which point I usually erase the pencil lines and close my sketchbook.
The only thing I wouldn't like about your starting a secret webcomic is that then I would not be able to find it and read it! Nooo!!!
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