"Man Made Monsters" BFA Illustration & Cartooning Thesis Exhibition |
Thesis year was a major turning point in my cartooning career.
This was not due to all the hype built around the project or its accompanying
thesis show. Instead, I owe part of my success to the framework of the project,
one of the many elements which came together to pull me out of the failures and
bad habits of my sophomore year.
In this inaugural weekly series for the Keep It Steady
Initiative, I’m going to break down my journey to a better work ethic into
advice which I hope will be useful to other students and cartoonists tackling
their own thesis comics or any long-term work. This week’s post focuses on
process and expectations, with a section dedicated to those who treat their
work too preciously.
The Goal of Thesis
Thesis is a scary and mysterious prospect to incoming
juniors. On one hand, great pressure is put on the student, with prestige built
around the thesis show and all of the exaggerated rumors surrounding our
department chair’s opinions and mood swings (Newsflash: Woodruff is a pretty
nice chap). On the other hand, those who took Keith Mayerson or Klaus Janson
for Principles of Cartooning are puzzled as to why finishing a 16-page comic in
a semester and a half is such a big deal.
One of the big secrets of thesis is that making a
masterpiece is not the point; the framework of the project is there to help
students develop a work ethic for completing long-term works. If sophomore year
is for pumping out work to develop technique, then the goal of junior year may
be to create art at a consistent rate and quality (while balancing it with
other responsibilities, depending on your load of humanities and internships).
Depending on your professor, the opening of the year is dedicated to
preparation, breaking your project down, nailing in the concept, initial
designs, etc. This is also an ample opportunity for figuring out your process.
In Keith Mayerson’s class sophomore class, it was expected
for your story’s last page to look radically different from the first,
considering how much your drawing and storytelling abilities were bound to grow
between at least three year-long cartooning courses. However, such a gap of
inconsistency may bar a thesis comic from entering the show. Once you move on
to the second page, you sacrifice most opportunities for experimentation, so
use those first few months to flex your muscles and work outside of your
comfort zone.
I must stress at this point that consistency does not equal consistent perfection.
While you’re searching for a better way to tell the story,
also be mindful of how you will make it. Incorporating new techniques into your
work process (such as using a lightbox for inking, making digital screentones, or
even working in a studio instead of your bedroom) will always make your work
take longer before they will help hasten your workflow. When you’re approaching
a major deadline, quickly adopting what is traditionally a faster technique may
further impair you because you’re not yet comfortable with it.
When I began the heavy lifting on my thesis, I tried to integrate a lightbox into more of my work process. While it was a shortcut for
some aspects of my comics craft, it also let me indulge my perfectionism.
Thankfully, I learned that it wouldn’t speed me up as fast as I’d hope before I needed it to save me from a looming deadline. So take advantage of those
opening months to test new tools and adopt a more efficient workflow.
No amount of preparation will help you if you view your work
with the wrong mindset. I’ve spent my life being told that I shouldn’t take my
work so preciously or I’d never finish anything. This advice always rang true,
my perfectionism being the greatest damper on my work, but it’s a simple advice
that’s difficult to follow. If the driving goal behind your art isn’t for it to
be the best representation of the story in your head, what should it be?
Your art can be
something to learn from.
As young cartoonists, we can erect a huge mental wall between
assigned comics and personal projects. The first comic requires less effort,
existing as a means to the end of learning a lesson. The latter comic requires
maximum effort; we want it to represent the pinnacle of our abilities, and
anything less than that seems like a betrayal of the soul behind the project.
Putting the matter of inexperience aside, aren’t you short-changing yourself if
you’re dedicating so much time to the comic you refuse to get messy with, when
you learn more from the comics that dirty your hands?
I feel that this distinction is not helpful to growth. One
of the realizations that helped me finish thesis was that it’s more important
for thesis to be a comic I learn from than one that looks marvelous. This did not
mean dropping quality off the back of the truck. I learned to perform a new
balancing act between the two paradigms. I would try to make a great comic, but
if I messed up along the way, I would accept it for the lessons it taught me.
The longer you spend working on a comic page, the more
frustrated you become when it doesn’t work out as planned. This only causes you
to linger more, because if you’ve dedicated twenty-four hours to a page, you
think that it better look like you put in
those hours. This was especially troubling for me, as I’m already a slow
artist. My ambition alone will not propel me to draw at the same quality as my
friends who were making comics while I was studying English and computer
science in high school. Ultimately, meticulously working up a page for hours on
end won’t help me catch up to my peers as much as learning to live and let
live, dedicating my time to making more pages in less time with the fumbles
that involves.
As we grow as cartoonists, we’re going to flail less and
have to make fewer compromises. However, we will always be learning. Like a child, loving a comic means letting it
fail sometimes. Each failure can lead to a plethora of successes in future
pages and stories.
Whether you’re facing thesis next year or are just trying to
tackle a long-term project, don’t simply set goals to complete pages; try to be
critical of your own skills and address the lessons you need to brush up on. We’re
artists; when we finish something, we only view a sea of mistakes. If we can map
out our growth among those mistakes, we can take in greater satisfaction from
both success and failure and propel ourselves to become greater cartoonists.
Next week I’ll discuss selecting and organizing a workspace.
If you have your own
thesis/long-form comic advice or
responses to my advice, feel free to comment on this post or in the Keep It Steady Initiative’s group and I’ll add it to the article.
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