Considerations on my project after reading the reply by Craig Thompson

Craig Thompson has replied to my comment on his blog at http://blog.dootdootgarden.com/2008/01/13/constructing-carnet/#comments  !

This is what I originally wrote on his blog last month:

1. January 7th, 2008 at 4:30 pm

Craig,

I am an Illustartion student in London and I am going to reference you in an essay, I was wondering if I could maybe answer you a few questions for me, in particular about Carnet de voyage. For example, on your website, you say that it is more on-the-spot then your other carefully constructed books but just how on-the-spot was it? How much of the imagery in the novel was actually done on site? Or was most of it developed from on site sketches into more final ink drawings? And if a lot of the ink drawings were done straight from life, were they then pieced together digitally on the computer to give the travelogue more of a structure and profesionalism? The reason I am asking is because our whole project has been about making drawings from life in peopled situations? And I was also wondering how you capture a scenery that is constantly moving (all those bustling Morrocan streets for example) without the use of photographs? Is it a matter of filling in gaps with imagination and focusing on different aspects individually?
Ok well I would be very grateful if you could answer my questions, thank you for your attention and a Happy New Year!
Best Regards,
Yana

 I was originally going to use his answers in my essay but unfortunately I only left a week between contacting him and the deadline for the essay but still I’m really glad he answered and this really does give me a better idea of how he worked during the time he kept his travelogue and gives me more consideration for my own journal keeping. I didn’t consider before that I could make still make drawings on site and then afterwards arrange them into a more presentable ‘comic’ form to make it more fluent and presentable. It didn’t even occur to me to keep two sketchbooks, one for drawing on site and the other for planning the eventual presentation like Thompson did. So his answer to me will perhaps serve to inform me for further projects. Also just thinking about how he said he’d spend hours getting sunburnt and harrassed by locals drawing the architecture, I think there’s something to be said for getting the best results when you put the most time and effort into something, certainly my most productive and experimentative days were ones I spent at the reservoir on my own sitting for hours getting cold, creating imagery and I’m sure if I had devoted more time to keeping a journal in the US, I would have produced far more coherent imagery but as it was I spent more time with my family.

 And here’s just an example of the kind of stylised way of dating a journal I was trying to emanate. Again from Craig Thompson.

Continuation of evaluating pages in reporter project sketchbook

The still life of the boots I feel are one of the most successful pages in the sketchbook, they have much more the look of a visiual journal and I think I have arranged image and text together quite well with the typography aspects finally coming together well to join the final outlook of the pages together. Also because it was a still life, I was able to work at my usual pace and therefore the image has more detail, neatness and proffesionalism. Having said that however, I actually did not spend very long doing it, certainly not over an hour so therefore I am quite pleased with the results as I think I am finally learning how to work quicker.

The thumbnail picture at the far right above of is the next page in the journal. I think the repetitive portratuire gives it a narrative aspects and makes it quite journal-like. I’d tried to capture all the different moods of my baby cousin within ten minutes or so of me being around him in which he cried, had to be consoled, and was happy again. This was quite interesting and interactive and made me think of things Craig Thompson mentioned in his interviews (that I looked up whilst researching him for the essay) of what its like to draw something so personal to you and how when he draws a person from his past he remembers them all over again and how his life drawings of freinds are more to do with him expressing his relationship with them then just life drawing for practice’s sake in one of the online interviews I cited in the essay he says ‘I mean, these figure drawings [pointing to a sketchbook] are more about the process, probably, than the final drawing, and they’re as much about the relationship I have with the people I’m drawing as the process. With each one [person], I’m remembering them over again.’ , this was particularly true and poignant for me as I was seeing my cousin for the first time and had never drawn him before (I wonder if this come through?). Also when looking through Thompson’s Carnet du Voyage I couldn’t help but notice the similarities of page 8 and my own journal page not just because of the subject matter of children or even the composition of the page but because of this idea of trying to get across a mood, or a character or scene through multiple portraits and how important portraiture is to these kind of ‘visual journals’ as we interact with people so much just in our daily lives. Thompson has about 20 pages alltogether devoted just to portraits of people on his travels (again this is something I was unable to expand on in the essay) and likewise while I was with the birdwatchers I had to rely heavily on portraiture to record the things around me and as I was interacting with them so much I felt this particularly important for the project and an intergral part of thejournal-keeping process. On a practical level, I feel the hardest part was drawing such a small child, the youngest person I had drawn before from life was a 7 year old and I found that I didn’t know/understand enough about the facial measurements of babies to quite get it right, the baby kept looking a good few years older then he actualy was! The thumbnail furthest left is afurther page in which I devoted the whole page to making a portrait of one of my other cousins, trying to describe him through both drawing and writing, and the thumbnail next to it of my baby cousin again who I was obsessed with drawing, trying to get his features to look right, I like how in that image I incorporated the Zzzz as a symbol for his sleeping and used it both as a an image and text (I had trouble doing this at the beggining). All these pages apart from the boots, were done during my break to the US to visit family, a week after I had finished with the birdwathers but I felt I wanted to continue the joyrnal-keeping part of the project while I was away because I had enjoyed it so much. 

 I just thought I’d upload some pages from my reporter project so I could maybe chart my development throughout and extend on some things that I would have otherwise added to the essay if we’d had a bigger wordcount. This the first day with the birdwatchers and the first page, I can see here that I’m still adjusting to drawing fast pace and don’t know yet how to disperse text and image together in a way that looks good, as I approached the reporter project as journal keeping and so in a sense the sketchbook is the ‘final piece’.

Here are the pages of my second meeting with them (the pages in between are of birds and scenery at the reservoir in which they birdwatch where I went to on my own until I could see them next). I’ve realised by this point that it could look more aesthtically pleasing and at least and try to attempt typography for the date, unfortunately it hasn’t hit me yet that in order for the whole thing to look ready to print (I mean the proffesional look of Craig Thompson’s Carnet du voyage which was an inspiration for the journal which was also done almost on site itself),  I have to treat all of the text as imagery in its own right and consider the composition of it alongside the inked portraits. I like the way I’ve set the scene though by drawing out the church hall first before I entered it, feels more like the travelogue and a graphic novel.